Noticed there was something wrong with my watch and checked the town clocks. One stood at 8.30, the other at 11. I had yet to find a public clock anywhere in Ireland that showed the correct time. There’s Greenwich Mean Time – there’s pub clock time – and there’s Irish clock time. The latter two bear no resemblance whatsoever to the former and display an admirable contempt for the tyranny of time.

Bought a copy of the Mayo News and unexpectedly, hidden amidst the obituaries and cattle auctions, saw that there was a small article about the show. Reading it in print jerked the trip back into focus just as it was in danger of losing itself in Pooh sticks. Felt real gratitude to the anonymous reporter who’d followed up the story.

At 3.30pm, got to Matt Molloy’s Bar. It was a small but distinctive pub on the main Bridge St and, entering the front bar, the first people I saw were the two musicians from Zachs in Donegal. They explained that they had played here last night and pointed me through to the performance area in the back yard. It had a glass roof, a raised and railed musicians’ stage and looked like a good place to play. There were several framed memorabilia around the walls. Matt Molloy, of course, was the flautist with the renowned Chieftains music group and the photographs were a tribute to his career. One large poster recorded the time when the Chieftains had triumphed in Paris, while other photos showed them with Van Morrison, Sinead O’Connor and, surprisingly, with the Rolling Stones – Keith Richards with his arm draped over Matt Molloy’s shoulder.

Matt Molloy with the Rolling Stones

By this time, though, I was flagging and in need of a siesta. Yvonne the barmaid took me upstairs to a small flat.

“You can use that little bedroom there. You won’t be disturbed.” Thanked her and slept.

Woke to the sound of pounding music from the bar below – the roar of Friday night drinkers and wild reels. The time was 7.30pm. Felt a moment of trepidation about having to go and impose Oscar on all that. It’s scarier to hear an audience than to actually see them. However, for the first time so far, I had a dressing room. Adjusted the costume in a mirror – this was bordering on luxury. Then concentrated and set off to make a grand entrance down in the yard bar. Reached the door of the flat. It was locked.

It was a heavy, no-nonsense country door and there was no way of breaking it open. Examined the side windows but they looked as if they hadn’t been opened since the Easter Rising. Repeated tugging had no effect at all. I crossed over to the front window overlooking the main street and hauled at the sash. It rose about four inches and then stuck dead. Looked at the skylight in my bedroom but it was far too small to squeeze through. There was no other way out. Firstly it struck me that I was trapped and secondly it struck me that I was due on stage in ten minutes.

Tried to think rationally. There was no phone in the flat and, of course, the mobile didn’t work. I could have tried stamping on the floor but, with the racket from the music, if anyone had noticed, they’d have assumed that I was joining in the session. Jesus! This was a genuine fix. Returned to the front window and gazed helplessly at the crowds parading up and down Bridge St. below. There was no way to contact them.

Then I noticed that there was a flag projecting from the window – a Co Mayo football flag. If I crouched up on the window bay, hammered at the glass pane and waved the flag, surely that would have some effect? So I tried it. For twenty minutes.

The few people who did casually glance up gave no reaction whatsoever. The attitude seemed to be that, once you’ve seen one Oscar Wilde squashed on a window ledge waving a Co Mayo football flag, you’ve seen them all.

Finally a woman did look up and seemed to sense that all was not as it should be. I bent down and yelled through the four inch gap:

“Help, I’m locked in!”

She smiled uncertainly, then she opened her car door and seemed about to dismiss the incident. Frantically I waggled the flag at her, then remembered the Morse code. Three short jabs of the flag, then three long ones, then another three short ones – S.O.S. She puzzled for a moment, then walked inside the pub. Bless her cotton socks – she’d understood! Two minutes later, there was a rattle of the door lock and Yvonne burst in, her face flushed with laughter.

“Oh, Jaysus, I’m so sorry. I’d forgotten all about you sleeping up here. Come on down, you need a pint after that.”

True.

Projecting flag at Molloy’s far window

Stood at the Yard Bar and talked to John the barman. A few tourists waited patiently for the show to begin but I needed more audience. Molloys was the only place where I knew there had been advance warning, even a newspaper article. So where were they? John leaned on the counter and commiserated.

“We’ve never had theatre here before, you see. It’s always the music. This is a first. Maybe they’re not used to it.”

He wiped a cloth up and down a beer pump judiciously:

“Also the Furies band is playing Westport tonight. There’ll be a lot of people at that. And that advert you put up. You spelt Molloys wrong on it. You wrote ‘L E Y’. That might have confused some of the visitors.”

He continued in a cheerier voice:

“Still, never mind. There’s some good stage lights rigged up for you. They were left over from last night.”

I decided to delay the start for half an hour.

The Chieftains poster at Matt Mollloys

By 9.40pm, there were enough people out front to justify starting. Stood in the shadows, announced “The time is 1898. The place is a café in Paris”, then strode on to the candle lit stage. John pressed his lighting switch and I was bathed in a sea of multi-coloured psychedelic fluorescence. It was spectacular but a café in Paris it was not. Breathed deep and went on with the speech.

“I have been driven to desperate measures to survive recently. Last month, I accepted an invitation to stay in Switzerland with Harold Mellor. A rather dreadful combination. Mellor is an extraordinary man; he has a face like a long dripping candle. I don’t think that he possesses a single redeeming vice and, although he has no enemies, he is thoroughly disliked by all his friends.”

The stage at Molloy’s Bar, Westport

The performance had been tired and there had been a fair deal of distraction caused by the constant to-ing and fro-ing across the front of the stage to the Ladies lavatories positioned by the side. Nevertheless, it received a good reaction. I’d got used to the idea of collecting by hat and tail-ended the show with some aplomb.

“It’s a free show but any donation would be gratefully received. The minimum contribution is one penny. The maximum hasn’t been worked out yet.”

Not exactly Petticoat Lane patter but it got a laugh and raised £33 – not bad really. Went back upstairs and changed. Accidentally kicked a pint of lager over the Wilde costume and the rucksack. Shit! From now on I’d be stinking of beer as well as all the other odours of the road.

The Fureys, etc.

Drank a supply of free pints provided by Yvonne and talked to a holiday-maker from Derry called Kevin and his twelve year old daughter. The talk drifted round to life in his hometown. Mentioned that I’d been in Derry last weekend.

“Nothing happened at all but coming into Ulster out of the blue and with an English accent you can’t help but worry a bit. I suppose it was just paranoia but there did seem to be some tension in the air.”

Kevin shook his head.

“No, that wasn’t paranoia. It’s the Apprentice Boy’s March tomorrow. It could be a nasty weekend up there. I grew up with the Troubles. Paisley’s Third Force paraded just outside our house when I was a kid. My brother was aged ten and he waved the Tricolour at them from our bedroom window. It was scary.”

He ordered another round.

“Still, we’re here for a holiday away from all that.”

He smiled fondly at his daughter. “Did you see her watching you on stage. She was spellbound. She wants to be an actress.”

The little girl nodded shyly and visibly searched for a compliment. “I thought the lights were great.”

A couple called Liam and Caroline came up to chat and it turned out that they worked with a theatre-in-education group in Ballina, a town about thirty miles north of here. Caroline asked where the next show was due. I groaned.

“It’s meant to be in Clifden. It’s a weekend tomorrow so there won’t be any lifts and the only bus doesn’t leave till two thirty in the afternoon. Which leaves me five hours to get to Clifden, find accommodation and persuade somebody to loan me their pub. Then advertise the show and then perform it as well. On a Saturday and with no contacts. It looks like a disaster. I really don’t know whether I can get it together in time.”

Caroline looked at Liam then said “Why don’t you do it in Ballina? We know people there.”

I started “Well, you see, Clifden is the next town on the schedule.”

Then I stopped. Why should it be? The schedule wasn’t carved in stone. The deal had been twenty towns in forty days but the actual choice of towns had been random to say the least. Certainly I would be travelling in the wrong direction, north rather than south, but it would be far easier to find a venue where I had a contact rather than going in cold to a town where there was none. Time for flexible thinking and a quick decision.

“You’re right. Do you think that it might be possible to find somewhere for tomorrow night?”

Caroline nodded “I think so. Ring me tomorrow morning.”

The die was cast.

Back Bar music at Matt Molloys 2014

By midnight, the pub had emptied. Asked Yvonne where I could get some food.

“You could try the Blue Thunder.” She paused and thought. “But I don’t advise it.”

The main street was packed with drunken teenagers and guarded Garda. However, collected a curry and chips without incident and returned to the flat to discover that I was sharing it with three builders currently working for Matt Molloy. We sat in the front room, each chewing curry and chips. It appeared to be the essential diet of apres-midnight Westport.

Lay in bed and realised that I’d only drunk four pints of lager tonight. Back in the Magdala, everyone, including myself, had agreed that the major obstacle to the success of the tour was that I would be ambushed by the liquor. But because the shows were starting so late there simply wasn’t enough time for serious drinking. It was the secret weapon that simply had never crossed my mind. Ah ha.

NJT at Molloys 2014

DAY EIGHT. SATURDAY

At 7.30am I woke to the sound of clattering crockery in the kitchen and wandered out to join the builders over a pot of tea. Rain beat against the windows and the conversation sagged desultorily. It was not a good morning. Then the foreman tried the outside door. Unbelievably we were locked in again. Oh God, not another Mayo flag job?

This time, however, one of Matt’s barmen was also sleeping upstairs. A few irate minutes of rapping on his door and he emerged blinking in a dressing gown and bearing the key. The builders left and the barman wordlessly returned to bed. I sat drinking tea and watching the rain bounce off the grey slate roofs across the yard. Everything depended on the phone call to Caroline. If the Ballina contacts failed, then it was going to be a frightful hassle getting Clifden together.

Levered Bosie down the narrow staircase then walked along Bridge St to a phone box. Caroline’s voice sounded cheerful.

“Yes, it looks as if things are OK. There’s a pub in Ballina called Gaughan’s. Ask for John.” Oh, Caroline, you total darling!

Rang Brendan in Galway to tell him about the switch. “I know I’m going north again but generally I’m drifting south. Rather like the plague.”

Brendan sounded sleepy.

“We may have a problem in Galway as well. The place I was thinking of, the Roisin Dubh, has got a music festival running. I don’t think you’ll be able to play there. Still, don’t worry, I’ve got a Plan B.”

“These days, Brendan,” I replied “I’m living on Plan B’s.”

Ducked into a café and ate breakfast and chips; then out into the rain again and checked the bus timetable to Ballina. There was nothing at all till four in the afternoon. Although it would be through fairly deserted country and it was a weekend and it was raining, there was no choice but to hitch. Walked along Bridge St looking for a signpost to Ballina. Suddenly my arm was grabbed and a man peered uncertainly at me.

“It’s Neil, isn’t it?”

A woman walked up smiling and stood beside him. Stared at them, then recognition flooded through.

“Liamy! And Geraldine!”

How completely astonishing! The last time that I’d seen them was in a pub called Minogues in London over ten years ago. Liamy had been the bar manager and Geraldine, his girlfriend, had worked there with him. We exchanged news excitedly. They were married now and had returned to Ireland to live in Westport.

“I read somewhere that you were touring about” said Liamy “That’s how I recognised you. Look, come on back for a cup of tea.”

“The trouble is that I’ve got to hitch-hike to Ballina by this afternoon.”

“We’re driving over to Dundalk later today. We can give you a lift to Ballina.”

Oh boy, when Fortune smiles!

Liamy and Geraldine, Westport

Sat and chatted in their kitchen as various friends and relations dropped in and out. Liamy and Gerardine had always managed to generate a wonderfully friendly atmosphere whether in a bar or, as now, in their own home. It was genuinely good to see them again – they were the sort of people who make life glow.

All the same, as Liamy explained, they had experienced some difficulties since the London days.

“We lived in Luton for a while before coming back. It’s taken me three years to get Luton out of my soul.”

The conversation shifted to reminiscences about life at Minogue’s Bar in Islington a decade ago.

“My favourite character in the bar” said Gerardine “was the old piano player. He was a total alcoholic but he really had style. He went to his doctor once and the doctor asked him how much he was drinking.

“One night we got a call from the local police saying that there’d been a bomb threat to the pub. We used to get them all the time so I wasn’t too bothered. But I thought we’d better evacuate the place for a bit just in case. Everyone was standing out in the Liverpool Road chatting for a few minutes while I had a quick look around. Suddenly an upstairs window flew open and the piano player appeared in his pyjamas.

It turned out that Liamy now worked as a journalist on Mid-West Radio. Immediately we both leapt on the idea that the Wilde tour could be broadcast as another ‘Tony Hawks and Fridge’ phenomenon. Then, remembering the recalcitrant mobile, I shook my head.

“There’s no way that I could keep in touch.”

Instead we had a costumed photo call on the road outside followed by a taped radio interview. Explained the basic idea of the trip and then told him the story about being locked in at Matt Molloys with the football flag.

“Hm” mused Liamy “It strikes me you would have been in the perfect position to write the Ballad of Westport Jail.”

At 2.30pm, we drove out of town back along the Castlebar road. Relaxed and thought about the terrific friendliness that I’d met so far. Somewhere in Donegal, I’d seen a tea towel designed for the tourist market with the inscription:

‘In Ireland, there are no strangers. There are just friends you haven’t met yet.’

My city-ingrained cynicism had readjusted the saying to:

‘In London, there are no strangers. There are just people who haven’t mugged you yet.’

But strangely, the cynicism was beginning to melt. Maybe the tea towel was right after all?

NEXT WEEK on Tuesday February 26 – Ballina, the Moonlight, and the Horse.

NJT reading ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’ near the Lake Isle of Innisfree 2014

MATT MOLLOY’S BAR, WESTPORT – PART ONE

Stood at the bus stop and checked the time table. After looking at the map earlier, I’d worked out that the journey to Westport was about 120 miles across mostly country roads. Here was a clear and justifiable case for minor cheating. It was a devil of a long way and I was not feeling on top form. The bus itself was going to Galway and the nearest stopping place to Co Mayo was called Charlestown; from there, it would be a matter of linking up with a connection.

The timetable was a litany of grass-stalk-chewingly rural bus stops:

Collooney/Johnny Mac’s;

Creeslough/the Car Park;

Falcarragh/the Phone Box;

Kilmacrennan/the Hill Top; etc.

Sat on the wall opposite the Garda Station and had a cigarette. There were a clutch of international flags flying over the Abbey Hotel: American, French, German, Italian, Japanese, the EU, etc, but no Union Jack. In fact, throughout Ireland I never saw a single Union Jack. Considering the political situation I suppose that this was not surprising. However, one flag – probably the Spanish – was an almost exact replica of the M.C.C. colours at Lords Cricket Ground. Doubted whether this was the impression intended by the more passionate Republicans.

Caught the bus in the company of the two musicians from Zachs, who were travelling light with just a guitar and a banjo. They were pleasant enough but still utterly silent – men who let their music speak for them. The road climbed a hill going south overlooking Donegal bay where the sun glittered on the wooded islets and tiny peninsulas below. A few miles further on, there was a field with about a dozen very large bales of grain, each trussed in a shiny black bin-liner cover. They stretched in a regular line about six feet apart from each other. A big white-painted letter appeared on the end of each bale. Along the line, the message read:

‘F U C K O F F C R O W S !’

Portora Royal School

Crossed over the estuary of the River Erne, then down a lethally steep hill into the pretty village of Ballyshannon. For the first time this trip I was in striking distance of a genuine Wildean echo. At the other end of Lower Lough Erne was Enniskillen where Oscar had attended the Portora Royal School roughly around 1870.

NJT at Portora Royal School 2014

The only comment that I could remember him making about it was ‘I have forgotten about my schooldays. I have a vague impression that they were detestable.’ Oddly enough, the playwright Samuel Beckett was also an ex-pupil.

On through the flat dull-looking seaside resort of Bundoran, under the intimidatingly skull-like Dartry Mountains, then past Drumcliffe church yard – the burial place of W. B. Yeats.

As the journey unfolded I was finding it impossible not to think about the Irish literary heritage. It wasn’t just Oscar, it was all the rest of them. Ireland’s influence on twentieth century writing in English was astounding. From a population consisting of less than the population of the Home Counties, it has provided – admittedly very arguably – the greatest poet of the century, W. B. Yeats; the greatest novelist, James Joyce; the greatest wit, Wilde; and the greatest polymathic playwright, Bernard Shaw. Just for flavouring, you could throw in a couple more Nobel Literature Prize Winners, Seamus Heaney and Samuel Beckett. And that’s only to start with.

NJT at Yeats’ grave 2014

So it was that I looked at Yeats’ graveyard with respect. I’d always liked the possibly apocryphal story that the writer Oliver Gogarty had told about Yeats. He said Yeats had been phoned by an old friend called Smiler.

“Senator Yeats” said Smiler “Through you and to you a great honour has been paid to our country and to yourself. I have just received a cable from Stockholm telling me that you have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. This is a remarkable day for the Irish nation and for the Hibernian diaspora in many a far-flung land. It is as if the harp of Blind Rafferty had been restrung to herald a …..”

However, the bus driver cast a cold eye on it and we passed by. A fifteen-minute stop in the bustling town of Sligo, then on to the south-west. The musicians climbed off at a village called Tubbercurry that sounded vaguely like an Indian restaurant.

Arrived in Charlestown at midday. It was a crossroads village notable mostly for the very wide streets and for a 10 foot high metal sculpture of three sheep standing at the centre. Enquired at a grocery as to the possibility of transport to the next objective, Castlebar.

“No, there isn’t any. Your only chance is to get a taxi.”

For thirty miles? No way. Damn. Had a meal at Mulligan’s Café and reluctantly concluded that the attempt at cheating had been foiled by the Connaught bus companies. It was back to the thumb again. Walked to the western edge of Charlestown.

After a dispiriting hour failing to attract a lift from a procession of tourist cars and a slow cortege of tractors, finally a car did stop. It was a middle-aged Dubliner and his West Indian girlfriend. I crammed into the back seat with Bosie wedged on top and one of its wheels jammed in my ear. Bosie was about twelve inches too long for the average car.

Conversation was reduced to a minimum by rattling engine noises so the woman played a country and western tape instead. ‘The Streets of Laredo’ drowned out the din as we drove further into Co Mayo. That it was Co Mayo was repeatedly emphasised by dozens of red and green flags adorned with the words ‘Up Mayo’ flying from every lamp post and tree. The explanation for this explosion of regional fervour was that Mayo had reached the semi-finals of the All Ireland Football League. They had been narrowly denied the Championship for about seven years and this time they were expected to win.

It reminded me of a story about the writer, Brendan Behan, who, although a Dublin man, liked to wear a Co Down football rosette which read ‘Up Down’.

They dropped me in the town of Castlebar; where I thanked them but turned down their kindly offer of a lift on to Westport. There was a good reason for not arriving in Westport tonight for, if I did so, inevitably there would be drinking at the pub. Four solid nights of boozing had taken their toll already and I needed a rest and an evening of quiet reflection maybe tempered by a beaker of cocoa. Also I had what seemed to be the start of a slight cold – an occasional but ominous sniffle. Camping out would have to be abandoned for a while but a B&B was out of the question. Despite the earnings from the hat, the kitty was not looking good and I had to stop the money haemorrhage. A hostel would be the best bet, cheap but dry, and also a virtually a new experience. I couldn’t remember ever having stayed inside a hostel before. Back in the hippie Sixties it was regarded as infra dig.

Looked around vaguely at the main street and a short, smartly dressed old man smiled up at me.

“Are you lost, now, son?”

“I’m looking for a Tourist Office.”

“Sure, that’s not a problem. I’ll show you.”

He led me down the street while pointing out various buildings.

“You see the Kingsbridge Inn on the next corner? That was where General Humbert stayed when the French Army invaded back in nineteen seventy eight.”

“Er….wasn’t it seventeen ninety eight?”

“Ah, yes, you’re right now. It was seventeen ninety-eight. It was the year of the Great Rising. And General Humbert’s cavalry stayed in that video shop over there.”

We halted outside the Information Office and he offered me his hand.

“And now you can say that you’ve met a Castlebar man” he ended proudly.

The motto of Castlebar was ‘The Friendly Town’ – I think they got it right.

The 1798 Memorial, Castlebar

A girl in the office directed me round the corner to a hostel where I rang the bell and waited. Eventually a man of about fifty with thick black round spectacles unlocked the door and led me to his office.

“That’ll be fourteen pounds for a single room or eight pounds fifty for the dormitory”.

I needed sleep so it would have to be a single. With laboured ceremony, the man lifted down a ledger and instructed me to write details of birth, country, address, reasons for travel, etc., etc. Did so and handed over fourteen pounds. He scrutinised my writing, pressed a sheet of blotting paper on top and, replacing the ledger, said:

“Welcome to the hostel”.

We waited in silence. Then, as if suddenly remembering, he added:

“Would you like to have a key to the room?”

“Well, it might come in handy.”

He stroked his chin and looked anxiously at me.

“That would be five pounds deposit.”

Followed him up the stairs to the room. It was austere to the point of bleakness, consisting of a bunk bed, a table and a chair. The only decorations on the walls were No Smoking signs. The place seemed to be a fanatically anti-nicotine establishment; with even a sign stapled on the front of the door under the room number. More signs loomed down the corridor like Orwellian mind control logos. Still, my uppermost thought was that the room was not a tent and I unbuckled Bosie and spread out the basic necessities. Having discovered that the shower water was cold, crashed out for a siesta.

Re-awoke at 5pm, sat up and hit my head on the unaccustomed bunk bed above. Acclimatising to hostel life might take some time. Dressed and went for a walk around Castlebar.

It had a slightly unusual style for Ireland; it had been a garrison town and the Georgian buildings gave it a staid, rather English atmosphere – it could have fitted quite easily into Wiltshire. There was a small park in the centre called the Mall and according to the tourist leaflet it had been a private cricket pitch for the Lords Lucan. Obviously an unfortunate family, what with losing their cricket pitch, murdered nannies and the Charge of the Light Brigade.

In one corner of the Mall there was a memorial column to the 1798 Rising and beside it the grave of John Moore. He had been one of the leaders, had been made ‘President of Connaught’ for about three weeks, then had been captured and died in jail. A few years ago a TV drama series had been made about the affair called the ‘Year of the French’, based on the book by Thomas Pakenham. And, indeed, you couldn’t avoid the French around Castlebar. Their general, Humbert, seemed to be everywhere – the Humbert Trail, the Humbert School, the Humbert Information Technology Centre, etc. (Vladimir Nabokov might have been pleasantly, if mistakenly, surprised by it all).

It had turned into a cloudy evening in that no-mans-land hour between six o’clock and seven. The shops and offices shut, the evening activities not yet begun and just the occasional group of faintly menacing teenagers hanging about. It was an hour of the day that I’d never liked.

Walked back along Ellison Street – the main drag – and stopped at McGoldrick’s Bar. Drank coffee and perforce watched golf on the TV. I may be in a minority but I find golf to be the dreariest spectator sport in existence. Still, it was in keeping with the self-imposed principle of ‘No Joy’ this evening. Chained-smoked in anticipation of the hostel embargo later.

Crossed the road to the hostel and spotted the proprietor leaning in the entrance drawing deeply on a cigarette. Hmm?

He gave me some unintelligible advice on heating the shower as I retreated upstairs.

Lay back on the bunk and planned ahead. Westport was fixed. But Clifden? That could turn into a real bugger. Slept at midnight.

DAY SEVEN. FRIDAY

Woke at 7am and wandered down to the kitchen to make some tea. The kitchen door was locked so I returned to the bedroom and brewed up on the Calor gas camping stove, thereby, I suspect, breaking a few hundred hostel rules. Repacked Bosie.

Down to the now opened kitchen, where the proprietor sat hunched over a newspaper. He nodded good morning.

“So you’re off then.”

“Yes, I’m travelling to Westport today.”

“Westport, eh. Be sure that you go to Matt Molloy’s.”

“Actually, I’m playing there this evening.”

“Ah. The music, is it?”

“No, theatre.”

“Theatre, now.” he pondered for a moment. “I was sorry to hear that Eamonn McCann was dead.”

That came as a bit of a shock. I remembered Eamonn McCann. He was a Catholic politician from the Sixties and, in my opinion, a man of common sense and humanity.

“Yes, I’m sorry to hear that as well.” We paused out of respect.

He snapped his fingers. “No, I’m wrong. It was Donal McCann who died.”

Sipping his tea, he continued:

“I’m in the writing game myself. Have you heard of William Dodds?”

The name did ring a bell. I racked my brains. Was he a theatre director? A rugby player?

“He was hanged in London in 1605.”

The proprietor looked at me as if I had knotted the rope.

“He was a lovely writer. And he used all them really long words. Jaysus, it was out with the thesaurus all day with him.”

We walked to the front door and he handed back the key deposit with a quote from Jonathan Swift. I shouldered the rucksack with a quip from Bernard Shaw. Where else but in Ireland?……

Walked up Ellison Street under a solid drizzle. I’d also picked up a minor cough – could this be the start of a real cold? Whatever it was, I didn’t think hitching would cure it. Caught the bus.

Arrived in Westport an hour later and immediately liked the look of the place. Passed a café with a sign outside. ‘Breakfast served 10.30am till midday’ – a refreshingly robust contempt for early rising. Another café called ‘Ring for Coffee’ was slightly more permissive and had actually opened. Had the Full Irish Breakfast; bacon, eggs, sausage, fried bread, chips, black pudding, white pudding, mushrooms, half a loaf of bread and butter, toast, marmalade and tea. It appeared that the ‘Oscar Wilde Tour of Ireland’ was going to be fuelled by pure cholesterol.

A small river ran through the centre of Westport bordered by parapets and tree lined pavements called the Malls. Sat on a bench in South Mall and tried out the mobile phone. Somehow the signal had switched from EIRCELL to IRISH DIGIFONE and every line I tried was blocked. Absolutely no response at all. In Derry, at least I could reach London; in Donegal, at least I could reach Galway; in Mayo, I couldn’t even reach the operator.

Found a telephone box and tried a landline to EIRCELL. Their advice was that the mobile would only pick up the strongest signal; I tried their suggestion of ringing UKCELL but, being an international call, the supply of coins ran out before I’d even made a dent in the negotiations. Damn it to hell and back again. I sat and swore impotently at the piece of black plastic. A passing couple grinned, presumably at the sight of what must have appeared as a bedraggled vagrant cursing the world of hi- tech.

The Bridge, Westport

Crossed over the bridge to the North Mall post office and queued for postage stamps – assuming that lo-tech communications still worked? Glanced out of the window, then gazed in bewilderment. A single file of uniformed soldiers with cocked rifles was walking down North Mall. Just behind them was a jeep with more troops. One of the soldiers knelt by the river parapet and scanned his gun across the tranquil stream. The others fanned out and took up firing positions. What on earth? Then I noticed a security van parked outside the bank next door. It seemed that bank robbery was really frowned on in Westport.

Had a few hours to kill before arriving at the venue and started strolling round town. Came across a small bust of Major John McBride.

McBride had been executed after the 1916 Easter Rising. He also had been the man who had married Maud Gonne, the love of WB Yeats’ life, thereby throwing Yeats into an almost lifelong depression but also, as a by-product, creating some of the greatest love poetry ever written. In the crabbed but devastating revenge of the writer, Yeats had condemned McBride for all posterity as a ‘drunken vainglorious lout’. Sobering to find that all that white-hot passion should boil down to this pigeon shit-stained bit of bronze next to a ‘No Parking’ sign.

Major John McBride, Westport

Walked further along the riverside till I reached a wooden bridge and played Pooh sticks with cigarette butts for half an hour.

Then on to the Octagon, the main square of Westport, dominated by a tall stone column topped by a figure of St Patrick. The statue presumably was in deference to the holy mountain of Croagh Patrick a few miles outside town. Rested on a bench at the foot of the column and suddenly recalled that I was doing a show tonight. Started to mutter a line run through as an aide memoire. The couple at the other end of the bench shuffled uncomfortably then moved off.

Realised that anyone watching my progress this morning might have questioned my continuing sanity: ‘first, he was swearing at a defenceless mobile, then he was playing Pooh sticks, then he sat under St Patrick and started talking to his shopping basket’.

After half an hour, the road seemed to be where I would remain. It was not that it was deserted; in fact, it was relatively busy, but over half the traffic consisted of tourists already packed to the gills with their own luggage. I looked down thoughtfully at Bosie. It did seem particularly bulky today. Tried fixing the Oscar umbrella in front of it to conceal the actual size but this had no effect on the vehicles zooming past.

Or maybe it was me? A small twinge of paranoia returned. On one hand, the costume and persona hopefully would attract the curiosity and generosity of potential lift donors. On the other hand, it also could attract the attentions of homophobic psychopaths with a lethal dislike of nineteenth century literature. Tried to arrange my expression to convey an almost imbecilic amiability with an alternative capacity to dismember anybody who tried it on. A very difficult combination – ended up looking like Harpo Marx with toothache. Neither did it bring any response from the traffic other than a couple of V-signs.

An old Bedford van wobbled sedately to a halt twenty yards ahead. Ran up to it, trying to close the umbrella with one hand while dragging Bosie with the other. Breathlessly and rather pointlessly, I gasped “Donegal?”

There was really nowhere else to go on this road. The driver gave a nod, then his front seat passenger climbed out and helped me load Bosie into the back of the van. We drove off.

They were English hippies. I’d expected some banter or at least enquiry about the costume, etc., but they treated my appearance as perfectly normal. As the passenger leaned back and handed me a smouldering joint, I realised that this might be because they were stoned. A hitch hiking Oscar Wilde was probably an everyday occurrence.

The passenger was describing his religious experiences in India in an expressionless monotone and, from the look of languid boredom on the driver’s face, had been doing so for some time.

“Then I hit the coolest scene you’d ever find. In the Himalayas. I chilled out in this amazing monastery. Near Dharamsala. It’d really blow your head off. Those monks, man, they were just too much. Yeah, it was called the Dong Lo monastery. I think it was my karma that led me there. Amazing scene.”

The driver drew on the joint then drawled:

“You went to the tourist monastery. The really cool scene is further up the mountain. The Dong Ho monastery.”

It was the neatest putdown I’d heard in years. Not even Lady Bracknell could have done it better; it was a pure descendant from her ‘Importance of Being Earnest’ line about Belgrave Square: ‘Ah, the unfashionable side’. The passenger sank into silence as we passed through a ruggedly beautiful valley that according to my map was called the Barnesmore Gap.

They dropped me just outside Donegal town and I stood by the roadside trying to clear my head of cannabis fumes.

A few yards further on there was a Tourist Board signpost which read ‘FAMINE GRAVEYARD’. Now, I’ve every sympathy with the famine victims; it was a horrendous period of Irish history – it was in effect the Irish holocaust. But to promote it as the main tourist attraction seemed a bit bizarre.

“Hey, kids, eat up your Krispies! We’re off to the Famine Graveyard today!”

“Yippie, Dad!”

Famine Monument

Arrived in the centre of town about 1.30pm. The first two objectives were accommodation and a venue. Donegal was more of a tourist centre than Letterkenny and had an Information Centre, into which I wheeled Bosie and accidentally dislodged a stand of Claddagh rings. Bosie was just about manageable on the open road but in confined spaces it had a tendency towards unscheduled demolition. Apologised to the counter staff who were most forbearing, considering they were dealing with a man in full evening dress accompanied by an insane shopping basket. They gave me the address of a youth hostel on the Killybegs road. I made an unlikely ‘youth’ but no harm trying.

Camp site, Donegal

Walked to the Independent Hostel. Andy, the proprietor, was a hospitable pleasant man and the hostel looked quite pretty. The house itself was full but Andy gestured grandly to the lawn in front. “No problem. Camp anywhere you like.” Pitched the tent on the only level patch of land on a lawn with a gradient of about one in three. As a campsite it made a good ski slope. Had the feeling that if you turned over in your sleep, there was an outside possibility that you might end up on the main road below.

Donegal Bay

Went back through the town and reached the esplanade. It was a hot day, the sunlight twinkled on the lazy waves, the small islands of Donegal Bay floated hazily on the blue sea – who needed Greece when you’d got all this?

Wandered along to a headland dominated by a ruined Franciscan abbey – this was idyllic. A plaque described how the place had been turned into a fortress in 1601 whereupon Red Hugh O’Donnell had promptly reduced it to picturesque rubble. It seemed that Red Hugh had reduced most of seventeenth century Donegal to rubble. A particularly irritable gent.

Ruined Abbey, Donegal

Back into town and stopped at a fish and chip shop for a takeaway. Scampi and chips cost £2.70 – I ordered it from the young girl behind the counter. At which point the owner, an elderly man, came across.

“No, no, you don’t want scampi. There’s no meat on it at all. Try the cod or haddock, then you’ll get a proper meal.”

Abashed, I changed the order to cod and chips – costing £1 80. A victim of the Irish hard sell.

Arrived at the Diamond. This was the centre of Donegal – a former market place converted into a large traffic island, designed on a three leaf clover pattern and decked out with benches and low walls. Although surrounded by roads, it was large enough to be a real social area. Sat and ate the cod while a couple on the next bench smiled at me. No reason, just acknowledgement that it was good to share this spot in the sun at this moment. Nice. Nice day, nice couple, nice cod, nice traffic island.

Walked to the Schooner Inn, a decorative old pub, and asked the barmaid:

“Do you know Eddie?”

From the way she laughed, suspected she might be his wife. I continued (sounding oddly Biblical?):

“I have come from Letterkenny. Malachi sent me”.

She took the proffered tour explanatory leaflet and disappeared upstairs while I checked out the back bar; it was perfect for the show. The barmaid returned.

“I’m sorry but we do meals in the evening. We can’t really have a theatre here as well. It would get in the way of the food.”

Oh, shit! My heart sank. As had the Schooner.

Back to the Diamond – time for Plan B again. Just keep on trying the pubs till someone says yes. Went to the Castle Inn where a fat, grumpy barmaid scanned the increasingly grubby tour leaflet and sniffed:

“I doubt it. But you’d have to ask the owner. He’s off playing golf.”

A definite pattern was emerging. The owner was never, ever, around.

The mobile had run out of electricity so I went into the Abbey Hotel where a barman agreed to recharge it. Bought a pint and watched the hotel world swirl around. There was something about it that reminded me of 1970s Ireland in that the building had the capacity to be a five-star hotel but it had the atmosphere of an up-market student union. A place of great potential but let down by the lack of a ha’porth of tar – like a magnificent Persian carpet bordered by shabby linoleum.

Had another pint and reviewed the situation. I was in the same fix as in Letterkenny. For the second time in two days, there was no bloody venue. However, I didn’t have the same sense of doom that I’d felt yesterday. I’d begun to realise that I could do the show almost anywhere if necessary. Had a look outside at the Diamond. Would an open-air performance be possible? Then began to appreciate the decibel level of the passing traffic and the children screeching across the benches while discharging water pistols at each other. P’raps not?

Donegal Town Diamond

By 8pm, and three pints later, the mobile was recharged and I phoned Brendan in Galway.

“Brendan, I think you’ll be able to judge just how nuts I’m going by the fact that I’ve actually been considering performing Oscar Wilde on a traffic island.”

He sighed “I’ve got another bit of bad news. It looks like the bar in Clifden has dropped out as well. I don’t know why. Also, I can’t find anywhere in Gort that’s interested.”

Oh hell. The planned tour seemed to be falling to bits around me.

“Is Westport still OK?”

“Yeah. I spoke to Pete Molloy. They’re expecting you on Friday.”

“That’s something at least. There’s one other thing. Can you tell me if there is a ferry across the Shannon? From Clare to Kerry?”

“Sure, it’s called the Tarbert ferry. It goes very regularly…. Well, fairly regularly…. Well, I think it does? You see, the Celtic Tiger is awake but it’s got a few claws missing.”

“See you in Galway in a few days.”

Entered McGroartys Pub, approached the barman and began to explain the tour.

“Will you get your feckin’ head out of the feckin’ way” came from a large raw-boned man on my left. Realised I was standing in front of the West Ham V Bucharest Dynamo match on TV. Chastened, I started to whisper the request. A pursing of lips and slow shake of the barman’s head:

“You’ll have to ask the boss.”

“And he’s not here?”

“No.”

“Playing golf?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

Bought a pint as the door opened again and the middle-aged German couple who I’d first met in Letterkenny walked in. A roar of laughter and a flood of German, tempered by irascible grunts from the West Ham supporter. The dictionary was produced and we talked. The man chuckled:

“You were right. The city of Knock does not exist. Ha ha. It is a very good Irish joke.”

Zach’s Bar, Donegal Town

Entered Zachs Bar through a long corridor from Lower Main Street. It was rather like a large barn with a horseshoe shaped counter at the far end and a railed musicians’ stage on the right. About ten lone drinkers sat in the murky candlelight. It was a nightclub rather than a pub and not really the sort of place for the show at all. Still, nothing lost in asking. With clanking predictability, the barmaid replied:

“For something like that, you’d need to ask Zach.”

“And he’s……?”

“Coming in later.” Made a change from golf.

“Oh. How much later?”

“I don’t know. Later.”

Another dilemma about whether to hang around here and inevitably develop a hangover or have to spend tomorrow hunting for Zach? Decided that the hangover was a better bet – a more enjoyable one too, at least in the short term.

By 12.30am, I was beginning not to care where I was or what happened. Some traditional musicians had already been playing for three hours and the club had filled to the brim; the guitars, banjos and bodhrans competing with the roar of talk. Good gas.

Interior of Zach’s Bar

An old man clutched my arm and pointed into the throng.

“That’s Zach down there.”

Zach was a short man with an alert face and a baseball cap clamped on his head. By this time I had already composed a begging letter laying out the idea so I plunged into the crowd and thrust it at him. He read the letter quickly and peered up at me from under his cap brim.

“It’s for the craic, is it?”

“Definitely.”

“Yes, all right then. Go ahead.”

Resisted the urge to embrace him – the effect of being hugged by Oscar Wilde could be misconstrued and very counter-productive. Instead I gushed out a stream of drunken gratitude. Clung to the last remnants of sobriety and resisted having a celebratory drink. Instead I lurched out of the club and back along the Killybegs road to the campsite. Fell over some guy ropes, hauled myself into the tent and dropped off to sleep immediately.

DAY FIVE. WEDNESDAY

Woke at 10am feeling delicate but still elated by the coup last night and brewed up some tea on the primus stove. The powdered milk made it taste like diluted flour but at least it was hot and wet. Unzipped the tent flap and looked out on the main road. The weather had turned to grey drizzle. There was a signpost ahead: ‘Killybegs 10’.

I recalled a story about Killybegs about a court case there brought by the harbour master. He was complaining about the number of anglers who regularly fell in the harbour after drinking in the local pubs. He had been constantly forced to dive in and rescue them. On one occasion a conger eel had pulled in three anglers at the same time. Therefore, he applied to have a reduction in the town drinking hours. The magistrates agreed with him that this was an intolerable situation and accordingly reduced the licensed times by three hours. From twenty-three hours a day down to twenty.

Donegal Bay

Turned on the radio. It was the Gerry Ryan Show, the very same deejay who had helped Tony Hawks get round Ireland with the Fridge. A caller from Kerry was explaining why Irish farmers should not be charged income tax. Instead they should be allowed to harness cow farts and the methane gas could then be used to fuel cars.

“We could solve the whole energy crisis at a stroke” he continued, then added glumly “But the urban journalists will never take me seriously.”

At 11am, climbed up the slope to the hostel to where Andy the proprietor was gazing anxiously at the clouds above.

“It’s the eclipse in ten minutes.”

We stood, tea mugs in hand, awaiting the primordial moment. On the radio Gerry Ryan was enthusing at the extraordinary sight in the cloudless skies over Dublin, while we stared blankly upwards. There was absolutely nothing to see except clouds. Just a slight drop in temperature. Andy shrugged his shoulders.

“Ah well, we’ll catch it next time.”

He helped me put up a poster for tonight’s show. An Italian girl and her Korean boyfriend read it and promised to attend.

Donegal Bay

Into Donegal and spent the next three hours trying to publicise the show. Located a photo-copying shop and then started to affix posters round the town. Returned to the Tourist Office where they accepted an advert with the uneasy grin of those trying to cope with the demented.

Then I found an outpost of North-West Radio tucked away in an alleyway and decided that it was about time I started getting the power of the airwaves behind the trip. Sharon the receptionist phoned through to the Galway headquarters and I explained the tour to their station manager. She replied brightly:

“Right enough, we’ll put it on the six o’clock news.” Was this irony or was there really nothing else happening? Probably the former.

Throughout the afternoon I had been crossing and re-crossing the Diamond. There was a gift shop with a tannoy speaker over the door that was playing ‘Danny Boy’. ‘Danny Boy’ is one of my all-time favourite tunes; if I was stranded on a desert island it would probably be one of the eight records. However, this version was played on a particularly reedy oboe – to misquote Duke Ellington, ‘an ill woodwind that nobody blows good’. It was also on a looped tape. The second it finished, it started again.

After three hours, ‘Danny Boy’ was rapidly ceasing to be one of my favourite records.

Zach’s Bar Advert Donegal

At 8pm Zachs Bar was empty, apart from a barmaid. Zach was ‘out’. I sat nursing a lager and waited for an audience. Two of last night’s musicians entered and sat down silently to sip Guinness. The leader was a muscular balding man with the remains of his hair gathered in a ponytail. Three other solitaries drifted in and hid in the recesses of the bar. They were followed by the Italian/Korean couple from the hostel who gave a sympathetic wave.

The barmaid handed me the phone; it was Zach apologising that he wouldn’t be able to come to the show but wishing good luck. Decided that, come what may, the show must go on even if the audience barely existed. Started to make up again – this time there was no Sean or Traioch to explain that “it’s all right, he’s only an actor.” There was no mistaking the bug-eyed curiosity as I brushed on the mascara.

NJT at Zach’s Bar Donegal

Half an hour later another three people had arrived. The bar was large enough and empty enough to inhibit talking. There were only the sort of hushed murmurs that you might hear in a church. This show was not going to be easy.

Finally I signalled to the barmaid that I was ready to begin. She looked puzzled, then nodded and pressed a button on a CD player. ‘Mack the Knife’ suddenly boomed out and the pre-occupied drinkers looked up with a start. I crossed to the counter.

“Can you turn it off please?”

The barmaid flushed. “Oh, sorry. I thought you wanted some music on.”

I lit the candle on stage, announced ‘ the Time, the Place’, and started the second show.

“Great Heavens, how one wishes for a little money. This last week at the Terminus Hotel – an apt name – my bill has been left every night by my bedside and a fresh copy brought up with my croissants in the morning. You can imagine the state of my nerves. The French have not yet realised that the basis of all civilisation is unlimited credit. Empires fall only when they have to pay their bills. At that moment, the barbarians arrive. Still, I suppose it is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.”

The actual performance itself was not too bad but the sheer emptiness beat me. It was like shouting into the Grand Canyon. Each epigram seemed to die on the air and the lack of response was so overwhelming that, now and again, I had that spacey feeling that I was somewhere else altogether. It ended and I took a bow while a muffled spattering of applause emerged from the encircling gloom, like a tap dripping into water.

It then dawned on me that there was no one to collect the money. Knelt down, rummaged in the rucksack for the lumberjack cap, then walked out amongst the audience. A few more bodies had arrived during the show and surprisingly there was about fifteen pounds in the hat when I returned to the stage. I’d been expecting more like fifteen pence. As I scraped off the make-up, a barman came up and placed a fresh pint down on the table.

“You know something. It took some bottle to do that.

And, in the teeth of all modesty, I can honestly add that, yes, indeed, it did! It was the first time in twenty years that I’d done a show with absolutely no back up whatsoever.

The audience at Zach’s Bar, Donegal

Drank with the Italian girl and Korean boy. The girl said:

“In Italy, our actors would think it was humiliating to have to collect their money themselves from the audience. Especially in a hat. Do you not think that you lose dignity?”

“Frankly, I abandoned dignity about twelve miles south of Letterkenny.”

We were joined by one of their friends, a young Australian, and the conversation turned to national differences. Mentioned that although I was English, I was also a native Scot. It turned out that our group consisted of a Polish/Italian, a Scottish/Englishman, a Welsh/Australian and a Chinese/Korean – sitting in an Irish pub.

By half past midnight, once again the music swirled and Zach’s was crammed. Where had they all come from? And where had they been when I needed them? Never mind; I felt pretty good anyway.

A girl stood up and the room hushed to hear ‘She Moved through the Fair’; it was a beautiful performance of that tolling bell of a song and the applause exploded. Zach himself joined me and signed the tour log. He explained that he was incredibly busy – the bar had only been open for six months. Looking at the crowd, I reckoned that he’d picked a real winner.

Midnight at Zach’s Bar, Donegal

Uncaringly strode back to the tent through the rain, slid into the sleeping bag and grinned with satisfaction. Two down, eighteen to go. Slept.

DAY SIX. THURSDAY

Somehow woke up at the unearthly hour of 6.30am with not too much of a hangover. More tea brewing and radio, then took the tent down. Although the sun was shining again, the ground was wet and trying to keep the gear dry was damn difficult. Decided that in future everything must be stored in plastic shopping bags. The rules of the road grow out of experience and if that meant that my immediate world from now on must be shrouded in Tesco bags, so be it.

Washed the breakfast dishes at the hostel. Andy came up to say goodbye.

“Have a good time in Westport.” I felt quite sad to leave.

Back along the road to town with Bosie once more trundling along behind. Ahead, two burly skinheads were walking towards me and, with a touch of uneasiness, I stood aside to let them pass. Then, from behind, came a shout.

A fresh sunny day. Walked up to the hostel kitchen and brewed a cup of tea amidst six hulking silent German motor cyclists. Then made a pile of ham rolls for the day’s food supply. The doubts of last night had subsided slightly but this still looked like being one hell of a sticky day. Firstly, fix the venue, then advertise it, then do a line run-through, then set up the show, then do a performance.

Sat out on the lawn, sipped the tea and brooded on strategy. Some more tents had mushroomed around the hostel overnight – the German bikers, a French couple, two Dublin girls. A few nods and ‘good mornings’. Although camping is a very polite world, there’s not a lot of communication. Each group has its own literal patch of turf and stays with it – all rather suburban really.

Dropped into the Brewery Tavern and asked for the manageress. The barmaid apologised and said that the boss was going to stay in Galway till tomorrow. A small twinge of worry crept in. Tried to persuade an under-manager to accept the show.

“Sorry but I couldn’t take the responsibility.”

Continued to McClaffertys Bar. An archipelago of mute Monday morning drinkers sat in the gloom of the disinfectant-drenched bar. Distracted a reluctant barman from washing glasses.

“No, the owner’s not here. Your man’s off playing golf.”

Continued to the Cottage Bar. At last I found a landlord, a young sharp-looking man. He listened sympathetically but turned the offer down.

“You could play it here on a Tuesday or a Thursday, that’s when we get the continental crowd in for the music. But I don’t think my regulars would like it. Not on a Monday.”

Sat in the marketplace. That seemed to be the end of the affair; there wasn’t enough time to stay around for the ‘continental crowd’. All the obvious places had turned it down. What on earth had possessed me to think that this would be easy? Back in the Magdala, the thought had never crossed my mind that the pubs simply would not be interested. And here I was, stuck on the uttermost fringe of Europe, with not a single performance under my belt, and with a vat-load of egg flying rapidly towards my face. Something had to be done.

Letterkenny General views

Stood up and wandered along Main St till I came to the corner of St Oliver Plunkett Street. There was a public library across the road with a notice attached reading ‘Arts Centre’. A small flame of hope rekindled. Found the Arts Centre office in a large basement underneath the main building where a young bearded man sat blinking at a computer screen. I coughed:

“Sorry to bother you. This might sound a little odd but I need a theatre space to do a show in eight hours’ time.”

I laid the tour conditions sheet in front of him. He read it and looked up with a half-smile.

“It strikes me you’re really doing this for the craic, aren’t you?”

I smiled back. “Yes, I suppose I am.”

He scratched his beard and said: “Why not. I reckon we can fix you up somehow.”

The small flame of hope leapt into a blaze. The man’s name, let the god of fortune take careful note, was Sean Hannigan.

He led me out of the library, round a couple of back streets and knocked on the door of a private house. A tall man with a ponytail answered. Sean introduced him as Traioch, who just happened to be an arts administrator for Co Donegal. Sean explained the situation and Traioch raised an eyebrow.

“This is the first time I’ve ever been asked to put on a theatre production with eight hours’ notice. I’ll tell you what. McGinleys Bar might do it. I’ll ask Hugh. Meet me there at half past four.”

I thanked them fervently and left bubbling with relief. At last I’d got allies and the show was on. Raised up my eyes and saw the street sign. ‘St Oliver Plunkett’ had really come up with the goods.

Went to McGinleys Bar, having spent the previous couple of hours pacing round the campsite reciting lines. The memory seemed alright but a couple of dodgy glitches. Received a few odd stares from the German bikers – walking round in circles muttering to oneself did not seem to constitute acceptable campsite behaviour.

McGinley’s. The bar door opened and Sean and Traioch walked in. The latter introduced me to Hugh the landlord who agreed that I could use the back bar, while Sean handed me some printed adverts that he had run up on his computer. With just three hours to go, the venue was fixed and the publicity ready.

McGinley’s Bar Letterkenny

As I burbled out gratitude to my benefactors, the tinny sound of ‘What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor’ burst out of my breast pocket. The mobile had sprung to life. It was Brendan from Galway.

“Look, Neil, there’s a guy on one of the Galway newspapers who’s interested in the story. He’s going to phone you in ten minutes.”

Went outside and sat on one of the market place benches to improve the reception. The tramp spotted me and hurried across. This time, I decided, he’d got no chance; I simply couldn’t keep on handing out cash.

“Sorry, I can’t help you today. I haven’t got any spare money, I’m living fairly rough myself.”

In the middle of this plea of poverty, the mobile went off. Extracted it rather shame-facedly and pressed the On switch. The tramp sat down and listened as I answered the newspaper interview. As I put the mobile away, he sighed ruefully.

“I never get the newspapers ringing me up.”

There was nothing for it. Handed him two quid.

Woke from a forty minute siesta at the tent and considered another problem. McGinleys would not have a dressing room; most likely the only place to change and make up would be in the Gents. Maybe they had improved since the Seventies but, in those days, the lavatories in rural Irish pubs had been so primitive that they had given rise to the line ‘the land of saints and squalors’.

Also, I could not really leave the stage area unattended. God knows what would happen to the props and lights if they were left on their own for half an hour in a crowded bar. The only way round the problem would be to change and make up on the stage itself in full view of the audience. How bloody embarrassing – another basic rule of theatrical illusion abandoned.

Changed into evening dress, stuffed the props, make up and lamp into the rucksack and walked up Main St. An odd combination, white tie, tails and rucksack and I reckon the early evening strollers of Letterkenny agreed. Arrived at McGinleys with no more than the occasional comment, however.

Not only had the dressing room been abandoned but the background music and the lighting system had gone as well, there being no one to work it. This was really barebones theatre; it would be difficult to find anything more basic. Laid out the props on a bar table, arranged two chairs so that they would be within the circle of lamp light (just), then sat down for the trickiest moment of all. Took a glance around the bar at the groups of brawny Ulstermen drinking and discussing cattle prices, breathed another supplication to O. Plunkett, then raised the mascara brush to my eyelashes.

The conversation level dropped a few notches, then resumed more heatedly. I continued as unconcernedly as possible, as if a man applying mascara, lipstick and powder to his face was the most normal of sights in an Ulster hostelry.

There was a passably sized audience grouped out front: two elderly English couples, twelve regulars and about eight of Traioch and Sean’s people. As there was no music intro, I substituted an announcement. “Ladies and Gentlemen. The time is 1898. The place is Paris.” And set off into the monologue.

“I saw the Duchess of Swindon on the Rue Rivoli a week ago. She did not see me. I would not have liked to have embarrassed her; she is a very dear lady. I knew her well in England before my trouble. She told me once that she had been married for an eternity. I believe that it is in fact ten years, but then ten years married to the Duke must seem like eternity – with time thrown in. But she was delightful. In stark contrast to her mother, the Dowager Duchess. The Dowager’s capacity for family affection was simply extraordinary. When her third husband died her hair turned quite gold with grief. Indeed, she was a peacock in everything. Except perhaps beauty.”

Kept on going till the end, blew out the candle, and bowed. A really good round of applause, plus one yell of ‘Go for it, Oscar’, and the first show of the Irish tour was over. It had gone far better than I’d thought possible. There had been a fair amount of racket seeping through from the front bar but this audience had been terrific, laughing at the jokes but still responding to the sentiment.

As I sat down again and started wiping off the make-up, Traioch came up grinning and flourishing a black top hat. He’d been round collecting donations; there was about thirty pounds rattling around inside it. A feeling of elation welled up.

A slightly built Austrian youth appeared at my elbow and shook my hand.

“You are James Joyce very good.”

Eh? Thanked him and considered the fact that he’d sat through fifty minutes of Oscar Wilde under the impression it was James Joyce.

Letterkenny drinks with Sean, Traioch and Harriet

Drank with Sean, Traioch and their wives. Traioch pointed out that my watchstrap was broken.

“Oh, well,” I replied, “That’s the first casualty of the tour.”

Sean’s wife, Harriet, looked at me with some concern.

“Let’s hope that it’s the last one as well. You’re really going to do this another nineteen times? Where’s next?”

“Donegal town, if I can find a venue”

Traioch waved over an old man who introduced himself as Malachi. He peered at me.

“You should go to the Schooner Inn in Donegal. Ask for Eddie. They’ll put the show on for you.” Things seemed to be getting better and better.

When Sean and Traioch rose to leave, I felt a real surge of appreciation towards them. Without their aid, I’d have been stumped before I’d started. We shook hands and I promised to keep in touch with news of the tour. Relaxed back almost dazedly trying to take it all in. In the background, I could hear an old Kinks number: ‘Waterloo Sunset’. Heaven. It seemed that even the Letterkenny taste in muzac matched my own.

Walked back through the streets. Still a lot of people around – at 1.30 on a Tuesday morning? There was something almost of the Mediterranean lifestyle about Letterkenny. Reached the tent, tumbled inside, lay back on the lilo and felt fantastic.

I’d completed the first show, found out that the idea could work, earned thirty quid, got the name of a place in Donegal town, met some damn good people, and felt gloriously flushed with lager. Slept like a mellow rock.

DAY FOUR. TUESDAY

At 10.30am, crawled out of the tent to another lovely day. Even the slight hangover couldn’t blight it that much. Walked to the kitchen where three French girls were eating breakfast; I brewed up some tea and chatted. One of them, a small blonde teenager, asked:

“You have a very strong English accent. Do you not find that there is much antagonism to you here in Ireland?”

Thought back to the warmth of last night and smiled.

“No, not at all.”

Packed up the tent and started reconstructing Bosie. Soon it had taken on its characteristic squat troll appearance. Said farewell to the hostel proprietress and walked down the hill towards the south. Unfortunately the route took me directly past the bus station. The empty road stretched ahead; while beside me the bus stood ready to leave, its engine chugging temptingly. Oh well, I can resist everything except temptation.

As we drove into the village of Ballybofey twelve miles down the road, conscience struck me hard. Either I was going to stick to the plan or else forget it. There was no real excuse for not hitching. It was a weekday, there was no rush, and the hangover had dissolved. Delving deeply into the reserves of will power, climbed off the bus and walked out of the village. Stopped by a hedge, changed into evening dress, then opened up the umbrella. On the black material was the white Tippex motto:

On the Saturday morning, I flew from Heathrow to Aldergrove Airport just outside Belfast and arrived at 11.45am.

The Irish journal commenced:

DAY ONE. SATURDAY

Breezy grey lunchtime. Dragged Bosie out of the terminal building and cautiously surveyed the car park for snipers. Thirty years of horror headlines from Ulster couldn’t be erased that easily. Felt satisfied that, for the moment at least, I was not going to be cut down in a hail of bullets, and hired a taxi to go to Antrim town. As we drove along the main road, the Red Hand of Ulster flags flapped from the lampposts – maybe my paranoia was not entirely irrational. The taxi driver was a quietly spoken man:

“You want the station, do you? So where are you going?”

An immediate dilemma. Saying ‘Londonderry’ would proclaim me as a Protestant Unionist; saying ‘Derry’ meant I was a Catholic Republican. To be honest, my own religious beliefs could best be described as ‘Lapsed Buddhist’. Tried to think of a prudent answer.

“Coleraine”.

Arrived at Antrim railway station. It seemed fixed in a 1940’s time warp; the shades of Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson hovered round the faded brickwork and deserted waiting room. The only sign of modernity was a performance chart in which we, ‘the customers’ (how did we morph from being ‘passengers’?) were informed of the success rates of various railway-related activities. The only ‘100%’ concerned the elimination of ‘ticket queuing’. Looking around the totally empty platforms, this was not exactly a surprise. The other criteria ranged from train punctuality (45%) up to elimination of smoking (81%). Lit a cigarette and mentally reduced the figure to 80%.

Antrim Rail Station

Caught the train and travelled north passing through the town of Ballymena. Ballymena is famous as the home base of the Rev. Ian Paisley. Back in the Seventies, it was also famous because the town council banned the teaching of Darwin’s ‘Theory of Evolution’ from the schools. Certain Dublin commentators at the time uncharitably suggested that this was fair enough because the very existence of the Paisleyites was proof positive that evolution had not taken place. Decided not to share this observation with the fellow passengers – sorry, customers. Continued through the soft countryside of Co Antrim, changed trains at Coleraine, then headed west towards Derry City. On the right were the shores of Lough Foyle, on the left, the distant Sperrin Mountains.

It was at this point that I decided that, as much as possible, I would avoid jotting notes about the beauty of the scenery. The problem was that Ireland is SO beautiful that it would be easier to write about what was NOT beautiful – a sort of anti-guidebook, a celebration of the godawful.

In any case, my knowledge of nature was zilch; there were vastly more capable florists and fauna-ists around than I could ever be. Simply for the record then, the east of Ireland is very nice; the west is stunning; and Co Wicklow is the backyard patio of Heaven.

Walls of Derry City

Arrived at Derry station at 4pm. (Had decided to call it Derry not out of political bias but out of brevity). Took another taxi across the double-decker bridge over the Foyle and into the old city under the cathedral spire. The driver circled up round the city walls, then through a grid of terraced streets and dropped me outside a bed and breakfast establishment. Even if I might end the tour sleeping in a ditch, I didn’t intend to start it in one.

The proprietor, called Michael, was a tall, friendly man with a wall-eye, who ushered me into the bedroom with some pointed questions as to the purpose of the visit. Not sure whether this was out of natural inquisitiveness or whether discovering the intentions of strangers is an everyday survival technique in Ulster. On hearing that the purpose was theatrical he became quite animated and said that the house was a regular haunt of touring companies:

“We had Agatha Christie here last week!”

Derry City gate

Having dumped Bosie in the B&B, walked down the hill to the centre. Derry was too small to be called a real city; it was about the size of a large English country town. The atmosphere seemed familiar as well, the same high street shops, supermarkets, etc., until I noticed the group of dark-blue uniformed police with sub-machine guns scrutinising the shoppers trooping into WH Smiths. No, it wasn’t the same after all.

Bought a few items – food, a Calor gas canister for the primus stove and a copy of the ‘Donegal Democrat’ for local info. Returned up the hill and passed a youth with a slogan on his T-shirt: ‘Look Fear in the Face’. Not a bad motto for the tour.

Derry City street

Back to the bedroom and checked the cash situation. What with the accommodation, the train fare, two taxis and the shopping, £54 had already gone from the allotted five hundred. Jesus! Or rather, Jaysus! Decided that a spartan night with the television was advisable. The only TV channel free from interference was showing one of those American chat shows – Ricki or Oprah or someone. The format was the same as usual: obese multi-millionairesses haranguing inadequate halfwits about their reluctance to ‘gitta jarb’ – presumably flipping burgers for three dollars an hour.

For light relief, rang London on the mobile; it worked perfectly. Then tried the number of the proposed venue in Letterkenny twenty miles away. Nothing at all apart from some electronic whistles. Slightly worrying as I really needed those phone connections.

Spent an hour reading the Donegal Democrat. Checking out local newspapers is a good way of acclimatising to a new area; you can get a sense of regional pace and perspectives. Given the circumstances of the Oscar tour, they could also provide information about any festivities that might have a bearing on the shows. Read the Events list for the Clonmany Festival. Among the more familiar Barbecues, Five A Side Soccer and Raft Races were two extra activities:

‘5pm. Wheel Changing, sponsored by McLaughlins Motor Factors’, followed by

‘6pm. Crisp Eating in the Main Square’. ?

Clonmany Festival

Spent the rest of the evening watching an ‘Inspector Morse’ repeat through an Icelandic blizzard of static.

DAY TWO. SUNDAY

The breakfast room was mostly filled with French tourists. Michael led me to an unoccupied table, then returned holding a large tray of scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, etc., and gripping an old theatre programme between his teeth. Placing down the breakfast, he removed the programme and pointed to the cast signatures scrawled over it.

“That’s Ruth Madoc’s name there. From Hi De Hi. And that’s Sarah Lawrence from Eastenders.” He breathed hard and one of his eyes stared reverently at the chair beside me. “That’s where Sarah Lawrence sat.”

I gave the chair a small nod of respect as Michael picked up the teapot and started to pour into my cup.

“Have you met Ruth Madoc?” he continued, another eye fixing on me hopefully.

“No, I’m afraid I haven’t.”

“A lovely lady” he murmured distantly as the tea bulged over the side of the cup and saucer and flooded out across the table. I gave a warning cough and he realised what he was doing. Between us we mopped up the worst of it and Michael, gushing apologies, hastily removed the programme to safety. I ate some damp toast.

Manhandled Bosie down the stairs and Michael re-emerged. Signed an Oscar tour leaflet for his collection then he escorted me to the gate.

“So your holiday starts now, does it?”

“Well, in truth, I think that last night was the holiday. It’s the work that starts now.” He waved me off down the hill.

Peace Statue Derry City

Hitching was out today – the challenge didn’t begin till Letterkenny. I wandered along in the placid sunny morning trying to find the bus station. The streets that stretched back from the Foyle each ended with a view of the town wall. Ornamental cannon stood polished and pointing across the river. It resembled a historical theme park until the jolting thought occurred that this was not history but a symbol of present day reality.

There was a postcard stand outside a newsagents. One card showed a statue of two men reaching out to shake hands: ‘Hands Across the Divide’. Next to it was another card showing a cannon. By chance display, the cannon pointed directly at the statue. This was taking black humour to the limit. Caught the bus at noon.

Cannon in Derry City

Crossed into the Republic without any sign of the border whatsoever and arrived at Letterkenny bus station. The town was situated beside the River Swilly and was dominated by another church spire. Spires seemed to be the main feature of Irish towns; a change from the stately tower blocks of England. It was also a hill town with what the guidebook claimed to be the longest main street in Ireland – a fact I came to appreciate as I lugged Bosie up it.

Letterkenny Co Donegal

The first job was to locate the venue. According to the old man to whom I had spoken on the phone, the name and address of the pub, when he finally remembered it, was the Riverside Inn, Doochary, Letterkenny. Whether Doochary was a street or a suburb, I had no idea. As I walked up Port Street, a group of labourers were sitting around a building site eating sandwiches under a large sign reading ‘The New Letterkenny Theatre – Opening in Six Months’. Approached them with a bright smile of enquiry:

“Good afternoon. Can you tell me where Doochary is?”

One large man stopped eating and pointed up the hill.

“It’s that way.”

“Is it far?”

“It’s out of town.”

“Oh. Is it far out of town?”

He considered for a moment then nodded.

I tried again.

“How far? A mile? Is it in walking distance?”

He took another bite of sandwich, chewed it, then spoke:

“No, not really. Let’s see. It’s about thirty miles away.”

Letterkenny New Theatre

I walked on, then stopped and leaned against Bosie. What the hell did I do now? The Riverside Inn, the very first venue, was kaput. The tour seemed to be turning into a disaster before it had even begun. There was a sign across the road: ‘St Oliver Plunkett St’.

I half remembered Plunkett. Wasn’t he the saint of lost causes or something? Admittedly not as forlorn or as desperate as St Jude, I think Oliver was more the saint of right cock-ups. Anyway, he’d do for a quick prayer. There was nothing for it but to make camp and try to acquire another venue.

Found a campsite quite easily – there was an advert in a shop window about two feet from where I was standing. The site was on a lawn in front of a hostel a few minutes from the town centre. Erected the tent – a small blue bubble under a tall pine tree. The spirits had risen slightly. When once you have a base you can start to think.

The Camp Site Letterkenny

Decided to ring Charlie in London for advice – he was an old friend who knew Co Donegal well. Checked out the mobile and amazingly the display code had changed from ‘UKCELL’ to ‘EIRCELL’. How on earth had it known that we had crossed the border? Nobody else on the bus had. Still, it seemed that I could make calls within the Republic at last. The downside of this technological miracle was that now I couldn’t contact Charlie – or, for that matter, the United Kingdom.

Set off to investigate Letterkenny. Being Sunday most of it was closed but there were a heart-warmingly large number of pubs lining the main street. A multi-levelled market place led up to the main church on top of the hill. Below it at street level were four bronze statues of children commemorating the nineteenth century hireling fairs. This had been the place where the country children were brought to be indentured to farmers. From the expression on the bronzes, it had not been a popular practice amongst the youth of Donegal. Had a meal at a fish and chip café, then sat in the marketplace and contemplated one of the more lachrymose statues.

“Would you have any spare change on you, sir?”

Looked up to see a man with lank hair and a red weather-engrained face dressed in an old black suit which glinted greasily in the sunlight. Handed over sixty pence and two cigarettes; he grunted and moved away. I must have looked like an easy mark – the new rucksack was a dead giveaway, plus the fresh-faced rubbernecking of the sights. But there was something else too. He was a real man of the road. I felt a distinct phoney in comparison.

Back to the tent for a siesta. I was feeling knackered from the unaccustomed travel. On previous trips I’d noticed that an afternoon nap is a very good idea. It splits the day into two, allowing the first half for organisation, shifting accommodation and miscellaneous hassles while leaving the second half for performance and general socialising. It doubles the amount of time when you can work at full tilt.

Woke by 7pm. Had a chat with the hostel proprietress about a possible venue. She said that she’d never heard of any pub in the town having live theatre before.

“Most of them just play music. But you could try the Brewery Tavern. I think they had karaoke once.”

On first appearances, she seemed to be on the right track. The Brewery was on the market square, had some suitably sized bars, a youngish well-dressed-and-heeled crowd. It looked a fair bet. Even the Australian barman seemed amenable.

“Sounds interesting. But you’d have to speak to the manageress. She’s in Galway till tomorrow.”

Satisfied that at least I’d made a start, I sat down by the window to drink the first pint in Ireland for twenty years. A long satisfying swig, the mood of which was broken as I raised my eyes to the window and met those of the tramp from this afternoon. They gleamed with comradeship and the prospect of a free drink and their owner made a beeline for the bar door. Oh, bugger. As he entered, there was a groan of recognition from the other patrons and the barman swung into action to lead my would-be companion out again.

The Hireling Fair Children statue

Continued with the second pint and watched a group of children walking home and wheeling some large inner tube tyres with them. It reminded me of a story that I’d heard about Donegal during the Second World War.

One village was divided equally by the border, one half in the Republic and one half in the Six Counties. The local children lacked any organised games or pitches on which to play but then, as presumably now, used old bicycle tyres as bowling hoops. The local Ulster police felt sorry for them and arranged some hoop bowling races, starting on the Republic side of the bridge with the winning post in Ulster. The prize was sixpence. The races proved hugely popular.

It all came to an abrupt halt when the police discovered that the Republic children were bowling brand new tyres over into Ulster where, due to war rationing, they were very scarce and therefore expensive. They were returning with ancient tyres provided by the Ulster children, plus a fair cut of profits from the black-marketeers. Normal border relations were resumed.

Checked out McClaffertys Bar on Main St as a second string possibility for tomorrow night. Not really a good spot though; most of the seats were in small semi-circular snugs. It would be like performing to a row of horseboxes. Still, if the worst came to the worst?

Talked to a middle-aged German couple who had arrived this morning at Knock International Airport. They spoke very little English and I spoke even less German. With the aid of a dictionary, they questioned me on the whereabouts of ‘the City of Knock’ which they had been looking for most of the day. As far as I knew, it consisted of a church and a couple of tin shacks somewhere in Co Mayo. Its ‘international airport’ status was roughly on a par with that of Port Stanley in the Falklands. The only reason for its existence had been because of the vision of a remarkable priest, Mgr. James Horan, who had out-manoeuvred, horse-traded and blackmailed a range of official bodies into creating the airport. Don’t think that the couple believed me.

Moved up the street to Gallagher’s Hotel. It was a padded leather and burnished brass establishment and hummed with respectable wealth – an ideal venue. However, the manager shook his head politely but firmly.

“I’m sorry but we’ve got a function on tomorrow.”

‘Function’ is a sacred word in catering circles. From the maitre d’ of the Savoy to the disco bouncer, ‘Sorry, mate, it’s a function’ acts as the death knell of any argument. It seemed I was going to have to rely on the Brewery tomorrow. Had the fourth pint of the evening and eavesdropped on the surrounding conversation. It was nearly all about the Euro and Europe. It felt odd being in a country so emphatically supportive of the Union after all the begrudgery of the English press. Left after draining the glass; I’d got to be really careful about liquor. Things were tricky enough without having a hangover tomorrow.

Strolled back to the campsite after buying an ‘egg fried rice with noodles’ from a terminally bored girl in a Chinese takeaway. The hostel grounds were dark and rather eerie. Only the creak of pine trees and the sound of noodle-slurping broke the silence. Sneaked into the hostel TV room – usually verboten to campers (three pounds a night) and reserved for the legitimate hostel sleepers (eight pounds a night), none of them whom were in evidence. Watched ten minutes of an Irish (RTE) television news discussion about ‘the terrifying rise of armed robbery in Ireland’. Just what you want to hear as a nightcap before sleeping rough for the first time in nine years.

The clatter of crockery from the kitchen alerted me to the arrival of genuine hostellers. Back outside to the tent, finished the fried rice while squatting on the grass, then crawled inside to the sleeping bag and lilo. Contemplated the situation.

On one hand, I’d managed to evolve the idea from being an idle pub boast to actually being under canvas in the first town on the twenty town itinerary. On the other hand, I had no venue and no back up. And somehow I had to do a show tomorrow night. Glancing at the watch, noticed it was 12.15am. In fact, I had to do a show tonight! In approximately twenty hours’ time to be precise. It’s tough enough gaining a foothold in a strange town on your own but this job also involved having to inflict the dubious delights of my personality on the place to such a degree that people would voluntarily put money in the hat.

Also, what would it actually be like doing theatre in an Irish pub? The nature of theatre is that you work in a controlled environment. In this situation the script was controlled but the environment wasn’t. A recipe for problems. What about heckling, for God’s sake? For a stand-up comedian, heckling is a nuisance but at least they are used to it, the atmosphere is informal, and they can always come out with a witty retort like ‘sod off’.

But when you are in character, with a set script that at times is pure tragedy, you are entirely vulnerable to interruption. I really don’t think Oscar Wilde could get away with ‘sod off’, much as he might have liked to. If things went wrong, this could turn into a Monty Python sketch. Began to realise that this tour combined the maximum of difficulty with the maximum of temptation – the desire to say to hell with it and plunge into the booze and music instead. Drifted off to sleep.

In 1999, under the influence of a large amount of alcohol, I had accepted a bet in my local London pub to hitch-hike around Ireland whilst performing an Oscar Wilde one-man show in twenty towns along the way.

THE MAGDALA BAR, LONDON – PART TWO

However, the terms of the wager would have to be renegotiated. As I returned to the Magdala for a Sunday lunchtime livener, Lyndon smiled and waved me over.

“Do you remember last night at all? You actually said that…”

“Yes, I do. And the bet stands. I’m going to do it.”

He shook his head. “Ah, so you still haven’t sobered up then.”

I took out a map of Ireland and spread it on the table.

“Right, let’s work out the travel plan.”

Lyndon stared at it. “Are you going to follow the Fridge route?”

I nodded “As far as I can.”

Tony Hawks had skipped Northern Ireland on the basis that it was not worth risking assassination simply to win one hundred pounds. He had a point.

With the one advantage, albeit hazy, of having travelled in Ireland before, we set about the plan. The most northerly town available, outside Northern Ireland, appeared to be Letterkenny. Lyndon placed a salted peanut on the map to mark the first venue. Donegal was the nearest town going south – number two. Westport and Clifden came third and fourth on the strength of Red saying they were ‘very pretty’. Galway was fifth, because I had a friend living there called Brendan. Gort was sixth because W. B. Yeats had lived five miles away, so presumably there must be some affinity with the Arts. Tralee because of the song, Dingle because another friend, Michaela, lived there, and Killarney because of the Lakes.

We pondered over Limerick. Red, a Limerick girl herself, shook her head.

She pulled out a newspaper from her bag and handed it across. It was ‘The Kerryman’: a short article was ringed in red.

‘There is a story circulating the county concerning a young Kosova Albanian who joined up with the Limerick United soccer team and on his first outing scored a hat trick. Flushed with the victory of his achievement he dashed off to the nearest telephone to inform his aged mother about his debut and his moment of triumph. He found his mother in a less than receptive mood. ‘The house is in flames around me’ she said. ‘Your father’s body is lying out in the middle of the street while your granddad and granny are breathing their last in the backyard. There’s even worse’ she continued ‘Your sister has been attacked and defiled and I can see all the neighbours running past the windows carrying all our worldly possessions. We are totally destroyed’ wailed the distraught mother. ‘We are totally destroyed and it’s all your fault. Your fault and yours alone.’ ‘How do you mean it’s all my fault?’ asked the horrified young footballer. ‘Well,’ replied the mother ‘you were the one who brought us to Limerick, weren’t you?’

Lyndon thoughtfully removed the Limerick peanut.

Skibbereen came tenth because of being the most south-westerly town in Ireland, Kinsale because another friend, Jenny, had a caravan nearby. Dungarvan was twelfth because Mark’s uncle had once been on a yachting holiday there. Waterford because it was the next big town. Wexford, at fourteenth, was the most south-easterly spot; Enniscorthy because I’d once attended a Fleadh Cheoil (music festival) there and had been totally pissed for three days. It would be interesting to see what it really looked like. Arklow and Wicklow came sixteenth and seventeenth because we were running out of coast towns. Hollywood in the Wicklow Hills was eighteenth because…..well, I’d always fancied playing Hollywood. Moyvally in Co Kildare because Mary, the ex-landlady of the Magdala itself until a year ago, was now resident there. And Dublin was twentieth because two more friends, Bob and Una, lived there and it was where the Fridge had ended up.

The next move was to backtrack on some of the wager conditions. Obviously, hitchhiking would remain the main form of transport but I would be travelling with an inescapable handicap. Tony Hawks had had a month to circle Ireland but, within that month, he was free of fixed dates. Because of the necessity of reaching venues, I was not. If I got stuck on some mountain road and there was meant to be a performance within two hours in a town miles away, I would be kaput. Therefore the use of public transport, if there were any, was not ruled out in an emergency. Also, because of the lack of commercial traffic, weekends are famously bad hitching days, so public transport was again acceptable. Finally, we agreed to add what was to turn out to be a life-saving rider: no hitching with a hangover. With the compassion of a fellow drinker, Lyndon nodded indulgently.

We decided that costume would not be compulsory all the time. The need to relax into civilian dress now and again would be important to the nervous system. Even Tony Hawks had abandoned the fridge on occasion. Also there was doubt as to how long nineteenth century white tie and tails could stand up to life on the road.

Finally we reached agreement that only twenty nights need be spent under canvas. The rest could be spent in bed and breakfasts, hostels or hospitality. However, on a budget of twelve pounds per day, this looked to be less of a concession than it might appear. B&Bs cost in the region of twenty pounds.

“The one crucial thing” mused Lyndon “is that you do the twenty shows in twenty towns in the time limit. And I’d like the signatures of the pub landlords and photos of the pubs as proof.”

“Done.”

With the re-arranged conditions, we made a more formal handshake. Pub opinion ranged from ‘a masterstroke’ to ‘very silly’. Brian from Yorkshire gave a more lugubrious judgement:

“Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first send on a tour of Irish bars….”

The next couple of months were spent in mostly vain attempts at organisation. The more venues that could be warned before arrival, the easier the job would be in transit. But trying to coordinate a theatre tour from at least five hundred miles away and from a different country was not the easiest of tasks. Contacting the five old friends was one thing but dealing with their suggested venues was quite another. For example, Brendan in Galway provided me with the names and phone numbers of suitable pubs in Galway, Clifden, Westport and Gort. But nailing down anything definite with their proprietors was a nightmare. For one thing they were never there except at about eleven thirty at night. The conversation would then follow the lines of:

“Hallo, I’m a friend of Brendan and I’m trying to find a venue where I can perform Oscar Wilde as part of a tour of Ireland for a bet. Would you be interested?”

Sound of thunderous fiddle and banjo band rising over inebriated hubbub.

“Is that you, Liam? Are you taking the piss or what?”

“No, I’m speaking from London. My name is Neil.”

“You’re a friend of Brendan, are you? Well, Brendan’s not here.”

“I know he isn’t. But would you like a free show about Oscar Wilde in the pub. All I do is take a hat round afterwards.”

“Can you speak up a bit? Oscar Wilde’s Hat? Is that a band or something?”

“No, no, it’s a one man show. Theatre.”

“No, this isn’t a theatre. It’s a bar.”

“Yes, I know that. But would you like some theatre in the bar? It’s free.”

“Well, I don’t know about that. Free, you say? Well, how much would you want?”

“No, honestly, it’s free. Gratis. For nothing. I just offer the hat around afterwards. The show is called ‘Work is the curse of the drinking classes’.”

“Are you sure you’re not Liam?”

The only venue that gave a definite yes was a bar in Westport called Matt Molloys. Still, I reasoned, when I actually arrived in Ireland things should be much smoother. After all, there were eleven thousand pubs in the country.

Drawing on from Tony Hawks’ experience, there seemed to be one piece of equipment that was vital. The secret of his success, as he acknowledged, was due to the daily communication that he had with the main morning radio programme ‘The Gerry Ryan Show’. Each day he would phone in to report on his adventures and all over Ireland listeners became interested in his progress. Drivers would pick him up simply so that they could meet the ‘Fridge Man’, police cars would stop to enquire if he needed assistance, landlords would phone in to offer accommodation. It had been a brilliant idea and based on the pure power of publicity.

Therefore, if the Oscar tour were to have anything like the same effect, a mobile phone was crucial. Public phones were not an option. It would be impossible to guarantee access to one at specific times of broadcasting and in any case they were too unreliable.

On hearing of the plan, my brother came to the rescue and tentatively offered me one of his mobiles. He commented “Putting you in charge of modern technology is like putting Lucretia Borgia in charge of the catering, but you’ll get the hang of it after a bit.” True enough, after about five weeks, I had got the hang of it – sort of. It was wonderful but had one minor drawback. I had chosen ‘What Shall We Do with The Drunken Sailor’ as the reception call signal. After two weeks I began to wish I hadn’t.

Further practicalities arose. The tour would start in Letterkenny and end in Dublin, but there was the problem of arriving in the former and of leaving the latter. After manoeuvring through the maze of different train companies left by the ruin of British Rail (this being 1999), I found out that there was indeed a boat train to Northern Ireland but it offered the less than enticing prospect of arriving at Belfast Docks at two o’clock in the morning. The airfare seemed slightly cheaper and, aided by a family whip-round for free air miles, turned out to be a lot cheaper. I could get to Belfast and return to Gatwick.

Clothing was the next consideration especially bearing in mind the insanity of the Irish weather. I settled for a light jacket, a heavy mackintosh, a fur-lined lumberjack cap and a balaclava helmet. On second thoughts I abandoned the last item. Was it really a good idea to travel through Ulster wearing a balaclava helmet?

The final problem concerned luggage. In order to hitchhike, it was important that the accompanying bags remained portable and provided the least deterrent to potential lifts. On the other hand, it was necessary to take a tent, a lilo, a sleeping bag, tent pegs, a hammer, a primus stove, a saucepan, a tin mug, a plate, a knife and spoon, candles, toilet paper, a sweater, a towel, three denim shirts, four sets of underwear, a sun hat, an 1890’s evening suit with waistcoat and high-collared shirt, a theatrical make up bag, various stage props and a desk lamp doubling up as theatre lighting. Plus the afore-mentioned jacket, heavy mackintosh and cap. Together with a camera and extra film, spare batteries, an alarm clock, a large torch, a radio, sunglasses, sun cream, books, two clipboards, the mobile phone and battery recharger, a marker pen, a small torch, teabags, dried milk, sweeteners, emergency rations (bags of nuts and raisins), a blow-up pillow, a plastic sandwich box, a Swiss Army knife and a water bottle. And an umbrella.

I looked with dismay at the heaped mound of chattels. Then came the brainwave: a shopping basket on wheels. With an extra bag strapped securely to the front and with an additional medium sized rucksack I was just capable of carrying the load. The shopping basket stood at waist height and with the extra bag belted to the front resembled an extremely stout dwarf – Bilbo Baggins crossed with Falstaff. Despite these literary resemblances the equipage could only have one nickname though, that of Wilde’s boyfriend – ‘Bosie’. The more fragile objects, camera, alarm clock, radio, etc, were stored in the rucksack.

Half of Bosie

As an afterthought I decided to make a gesture in the direction of health and bought a selection of aspirin, Lemsip powders and an alphabet soup of vitamin tablets, which I poured indiscriminately into a sponge bag. It looked like Exhibit A in a drugs bust.

At last, with vitamins, mobile phone, air tickets, map, Bosie, and one confirmed booking, I stood ready for the challenge.

However, before the departure, there was one thing left to do. It had been exactly twenty years since I gave the first performance of the Wilde show. It had not been an auspicious occasion, having been performed in a threadbare bedsit to three friends with the furniture stacked against the wall to provide some space, with many embarrassed lapses and ‘No, don’t tell me, it’s on the tip of my tongue’ memory halts, some desperate ad-libbing and an unplanned interval when the landlord arrived unsuccessfully demanding rent.

The following years had seen the show at three Edinburgh Festivals, a dozen London fringe theatres, over eighty towns through Britain, ten foreign countries and a one week run in Dublin. It had been the subject of critical adulation and laceration; it had been played in famous theatres and in rural cowsheds; it had been wildly applauded and noisily yawned through from Boston to Hong Kong and from Reykjavik to Bulawayo. It had matured, although it had to be admitted that desperate ad-libbing was still an occasional feature. But the play had survived and it deserved some sort of anniversary.

Michael MacLiammoir (second from right)

‘Work is the Curse of the Drinking Classes’ was, and is, a fifty-minute monologue based on the life and writings of Wilde. It had been inspired by listening to recordings of the famous play ‘The Importance of Being Oscar’ by the great Irish actor Michael MacLiammoir who had given 1,384 performances over his lifetime. I was nowhere near that tally but, in defence, I was still going. So three nights before the leaving of London and with an invited crowd of friends and relations, I gave the ‘Twentieth Anniversary Show’ at the Magdala upstairs restaurant. Many of the audience had acted as stage crew during the years and knew the lines as well as I did – in one or two cases probably better. So it was more of a ceremony than a piece of theatre. Not that it mattered; this was not for the kudos, this was for the ‘craic’.

A brief resume. As usual, the stage was bare except for a table and two chairs. On the table were the basic props: a wine bottle, two glasses, a burning candle set in a saucer, a photograph, a lighter and five cigarettes. The play started in darkness with the Intermezzo from ‘Cavalleria Rusticana’ playing in the background. ‘Wilde’ walked on in full white tie evening dress and picked up the photo:

“One should not play Narcissus to a photograph. Even water is treacherous. The eyes of those who love you are the only mirror.

August in Paris. Gives one such a feeling of desolation, don’t you think? All my friends are in Trouville and most of my enemies are in Deauville. Paris is utterly empty. Even the criminal classes have gone to the seaside and the gendarmes yawn and regret their enforced idleness. Giving wrong directions to the English tourists is the only thing that consoles them.”

The next twenty-five minutes were taken up with a verbal attack on a variety of targets including Switzerland, biographers, English novels, critics, journalism, British artists, teachers, actors, America, German composers and hard work.

This was followed by a sharp downturn in the atmosphere as ‘Wilde’ described his experiences in jail – the hunger, humiliation and inhumanity – reaching a tragic climax when he was legally banned from seeing his children again. Later, the mood lightened as he commented on life in self-imposed exile:

“Ernest Dowson told me that I should develop a more wholesome taste in the sexual line and advised me to visit the Dieppe brothel. It was the first time in ten years and it will be the last. However, I’ve asked Ernest to spread the story all over England. It should entirely restore my character.”

The lights dimmed again and the music of the Intermezzo returned. After speaking the last lines, ‘Wilde’ blew out the candle and walked off stage.

Well, that was how the show was meant to happen and, on its anniversary, bar a stumble here and a fluff there, that was near enough what did happen. Downstairs in the bar, I raised a glass in silent tribute to Oscar and MacLiammoir.

The Magdala Tavern, Hampstead, London

Later in the evening I was talking to Mark and Red again.

“When do you leave?” asked Red.

“On Saturday. Back to the land of priests and pints!”

Red gave me a quizzical glance. “You’ve been away too long. That was the old Ireland.”

I supposed she might be right. When I had been there first the country was barely in the modern era. Emigration was still rife – the population of four million was half what it had been in 1845 and the political and social grip of the Catholic Church was extraordinary. Each Act passed by the Dail (the Parliament) had then to be offered to the Archbishop of Dublin to allow him to exercise his veto. There was effectively no TV beyond Athlone. In the west, the pony and trap was not just a tourist gimmick but an everyday vehicle.

But from what I’d read in the newspapers there had been real changes. The population had risen to five million, half of which were under the age of twenty-five; there was a superb education system; and average earnings were set to surpass the UK level for the first time in history.

“It’s not the quaint old place any more” Red continued. “That’s all changed. It’s become dead sophisticated. It’s the hip Celtic Tiger now.”

That got me thinking. Yes, I suppose they must be fed up with the old stereotype by now. If you are a slick young professional plane-hopping round the European Union fiddling with your website and listening to the Corrs and Sinead O’Connor on your headphones, you might get rather irritated at being regarded as a drink-addled, shillelagh-clutching hedge philosopher nursing an unnatural passion for leprechauns. In the same way that the English might get weary of being depicted as bowler-hatted Beefeaters with Dick Van Dyke accents and no sex life.

I still hadn’t forgotten Red’s words next morning. It was slightly worrying. Would the New Ireland have any sympathy at all with a venture as patently ridiculous and as useless as the Oscar trip? Would this new world of puritan, business-besotted corporate ‘time is money, greed is good’ apparatchiks give me the time of day?

So it was with foreboding that I phoned a contact number at a pub in Letterkenny – hopefully to fix the first gig and to explain the situation. The elderly man at the other end said:

“I suppose it might be alright. You’d have to speak to my son when you get here. He’s away playing golf now.”

“That’s fine. Can you give me the name and address of the pub, please?”

“Well, the name has been changed recently, you see. To attract new customers.”

“I see. Can you tell me what the new name is, then?”

There was a puzzled pause then the man replied: “Hang on a minute. I’ll just go and find my spectacles.”

[This tour was undertaken in 1999 – the north of Ireland was still a difficult place due to the previous thirty years of the ‘Troubles’. Prices quoted reflect the year and mobile phones were still a novelty – at least to me.]

THE MAGDALA TAVERN, LONDON – Part One

‘I am not English. I am Irish – which is quite another thing’ O. Wilde

It was all Tony Hawks’ fault. And that fridge. And about nine pints of lager.

A thin dagger of lightning stabbed down from the black clouds into a distant hilltop ruin. The ferocity of the rain increased till the roadside verge turned into a rivulet. The cow turds on the tarmac melted into a brown sludge that seeped slowly down the hill to lap against the base of a signpost.

An observer, had there been one, would have seen a tall bespectacled man, clothed in sodden Victorian evening dress, slumped on top of a bulbous shopping basket and clutching the forlorn half-mushroom of a broken black umbrella. On the still functional topside section, the same observer might have made out the shakily inscribed Tippexed letters that read ‘OSCAR WILDE’S…’ On the dangling quadrant, unsupported by a broken strut, was the remainder of the message ‘…TOUR OF IRELAND’. His starched white bow-tie, now drooping like a depressed daffodil, underlined the even more depressed face above it. The figure would have looked pissed off. And so I was. Very pissed off.

Not a vehicle had passed in twenty minutes and any possibility of hitching a lift looked minimal. A water droplet dripped off my nose and with a slight hiss extinguished the roll up cigarette beneath it. I stood and splashed down the hill to the signpost. At least it might provide some idea of where the hell I was? There was only one destination on display. It read:

‘Neolithic Burial Mound. 2 miles’.

Then, through the grey downpour, I saw the shimmer of distant vehicles. There were about fifteen cars bunched together – surely one of them could offer aid? They came closer and closer. I braced up and thrust out a thumb. And every single one of them passed by without slowing. Not only did they not stop but the expressions on the faces of the occupants were hostile to the point of antagonism. They disappeared up the hill leaving a muddy spray. It was only then that it dawned on me that it had been a funeral procession…

The roots of this predicament had sprouted three months earlier when I had been sitting in the saloon bar of my local pub, the Magdala, in north London. It was a Saturday night and a few friends and fellow drinkers were discussing tax differentials in a devolved economy and how crap Arsenal had been that afternoon. During a lull while the sixth round was purchased, Lyndon, one of the friends, asked:

“Neil, what did you think of that Tony Hawks’ book I lent you?”

“Oh, it was terrific.”

And so it had been. Some books might not rank among the great classics or even contend for the Booker Prize but they do stay wedged in the mind. ‘Round Ireland with a Fridge’ was one of them. Firstly it had been very funny, secondly it was wonderfully eccentric and thirdly, as the dust jacket correctly for once pointed out, it was ultimately inspiring. Just how inspiring it was to prove, I had no idea.

Perhaps I should have guessed that reading it might trigger a chain reaction. For one thing, the book covered such topics as hitchhiking, Ireland and pubs. While the latter had remained a sturdily constant feature of my life, I hadn’t been involved with the first two for twenty years. As I read on, I realised that this was an inexplicable lapse. Because I had loved them both once. At one stage, hitchhiking had been an addiction; I had bummed lifts on everything from a Mercedes across Andalusia to the back of a milk float across Loughborough. Then, gradually, the desire for comfort had settled in like a duvet on a cold night and the era of the thumb had passed for good. Or so I thought.

Ireland too had been something of a passion. A perfect example of why this passion existed had occurred on the very day that I had last left Dublin. Three months previously Pope Paul had died. His successor, John Paul I, after a very short period in office, had died as well. As I walked up the ship’s gangway at Dun Laoghaire harbour, I turned for one last look at the city and spotted a large newspaper placard on the quayside:

‘POPE DIES AGAIN!!’

How could you match a country where such announcements were everyday occurrences? But, having once been a frequent visitor, somehow I’d left it for good. Or so I thought.

Back in the Magdala, Mark overheard our conversation and, still ruefully chewing the end of his Arsenal scarf, said:

“Round Ireland with a fridge? What’s that about, then?”

Lyndon explained:

“It’s about this English comedian called Tony Hawks. He decided to hitchhike around the coast of Ireland carrying a fridge. It was all for a bet. A radio show got interested and he phoned them up each day with a report on how far he’d travelled. And loads of people picked up on the story and really joined in to help him.”

Red, Mark’s Irish girlfriend, continued enthusiastically:

“Yeah, he took the fridge surfing in the Atlantic. And it was baptised by a pub landlord and received a blessing from a Mother Superior. You should read it, it’s good stuff.”

Mark looked perplexed:

“He hitch-hiked with a fridge? Why?”

The company looked a bit stumped. Lyndon said tentatively:

“Well, I don’t know really. I suppose it just happened to be sitting there and he thought, what that fridge needs is to get out a bit. See the world. Meet other fridges.”

“Oh, come on” said Mark “I mean, seriously, why did he do it? And why would the Irish be interested? Was it because he was a celebrity or something?”

Red shook her head:

“No, it’s ….well ….. I suppose the Irish enjoy that sort of thing. We like the offbeat.”

I nodded.

“Yes, I can’t think of anywhere else that would accept something like that going on. Or at least so easily. Ireland is a place where the impossible really does happen.”

Mark remained unconvinced.

“No, the only reason he got away with it was because he’s famous. They would have recognised his face from TV.”

“I don’t think he was that well known in Ireland” said Red. “Not before the fridge trip.”

“In any case, I think it would be possible to do something like that whoever you were.” I added “Any one of us could do it. It’s only a matter of setting off, really.”

The evening continued, as did the drinks. A fantasy started to form in my head. Suddenly the gunpowder trails laid by Tony Hawks burst into flame. I banged my pint glass down, accidentally crushing a packet of cheese and onion crisps, and muzzily announced:

“Well, I’m going to do it!”

Mark looked across: “What? Buy a round?”

“No, I’m going to travel round Ireland as a vagabond actor!”

“With a fridge?” said Lyndon doubtfully.

“Er….no…. I’ll leave the fridge out of it. That’s been done. What I’ll do is to go as Oscar Wilde and perform the show in bars along the way. And I’ll do it alone. Twenty shows in twenty towns in….er…forty days. And camping.”

“Dressed as Oscar Wilde?”

“Yeah.”

“With no agents or bookings or anything like that?”

“Yeah.”

“With no stage crew or back up?”

“Yeah.”

“And sleep in a tent?”

“Yeah.”

Mark interjected:

“But you can do anything if you’ve got enough money to pay your way. You could hire someone to fix it all.”

“No, I won’t. Tell you what. I guarantee to take no more than five hundred pounds to cover forty days. And the only other money I can have is that which can be raised by taking a hat round after a show.”

There was a silence broken only by the thoughtful crunch of peanuts.

“Anyone want to take the bet?” I ventured.

“What bet?”

“Tony Hawks did it for one hundred pounds. I’ll do it for the same amount.”

Lyndon took a deep breath.

“OK, you’re on. I’ll meet you on the Ha’penny Bridge in Dublin with the hundred pounds within forty days of you setting off.”

Grinning broadly, he reached over his hand and we shook on the deal.

Next morning I raised a red-rimmed eyelid and surveyed the litter of empty bottles strewn below the sofa. A hazy memory of the previous night returned. “Oh dear”…

A couple of hours later most of the details had fallen into place. What had the hell had I done? I had voluntarily committed myself to a course of action that – sober – was ludicrous. And unnecessary. And potentially downright dangerous. For I was no longer in the first flush of youth or even in the last rancid pallor of it. There was no avoiding the obvious; I was middle-aged. Living rough for six weeks was begging for trouble in health terms. The last time I had been camping was with a younger New Age girlfriend. It had been nine years previously, had only lasted three nights and I had wound up with a rheumatic knee, mild bronchitis and guy-rope burns.

Also I had to admit to a strong affection for alcohol but, as that morning was proving, the resulting hangovers could no longer be carelessly disregarded. They had become distinctly debilitating. I had reached the age where liquor should be treated sparingly and with caution. A non-stop tour of Irish pubs was not exactly the obvious way to avoid booze.

Another point arose. Travelling alone with luggage marks you out immediately as a classic crime target. It is like walking around with a sign reading ‘I am a stranger and I am carrying valuables. Please help yourselves.’ Also, my very English actor’s accent in the political climate particularly of Ulster was not calculated to win any popularity contests. Added to that, I would be very visible as Oscar Wilde. Although my personal sexual proclivities are heterosexual to the point of satyriasis, there was no denying that Oscar was gay. What might be run of the mill in the north London sun-dried tomato belt might not be so welcome in rural Ireland? To a gang of anti-English, queer-bashing street muggers I would be manna gift-wrapped by heaven.

Then there were the money restrictions. Five hundred pounds for forty days worked out at twelve fifty a day. Was it possible to survive on that? Anyone scraping by on the dole or a state pension would treat that question with derision, but from past experience I knew that living on the road was damn expensive. Home dwellers tend to wildly underestimate the cost of being roofless. Faced with an empty evening, the householder can boil a kettle, turn on the TV and veg out on the sofa – total cost of about fifty pence. In a tent (campsite space alone costing four pounds on average), mind-strangling boredom forces you to seek other activities. A cinema ticket will cost a fiver, while an evening in a pub, even spinning out the drink like a lost wanderer in the Kalahari, will require at least ten pounds.

During the daytime, with the ever present threat of rain, taking cover involves cafes, museums, burger bars, art galleries, burger galleries, etc, etc: £3 here, £4 there. Then there are the luxuries like food. Alfresco cooking, at least in my inept hands, is difficult, messy, irritating, hazardous and largely inedible. It is claimed that each of us eats a pound of dirt during our lifetimes – on the aforementioned trip I think I ate it all in three days. Human nature, that all-purpose euphemism for laziness, draws you inexorably to the chip shop and the kebab stall. Not to mention all the other costs. No, life is cheaper under a roof than under the stars, or more accurately, under the clouds. On fifty pounds a day it would be tolerable, on twelve pounds it looked dismal.

The more I looked at the disadvantages, the more it became obvious that the whole concept was out of the question.

And yet?

Brooding over the fourth mug of black coffee, I couldn’t quite abandon the idea. The next four months in London looked dull. There were no bookings for the show till September. My New Age girlfriend had long since departed to India to study tantric sex and advanced joint-rolling. The faint aroma of her patchouli still hung sadly in the air. The pub regulars themselves were slipping away on vague holidays to Boulogne or Bangkok. Suntans were to be seen even in the deepest recesses of the public bar. I was bored and, if I ducked the Irish bet, I’d be even more bored.

Why not? It couldn’t be that difficult. It was only a matter of taking the first step.

In search of a more peaceful life we moved on to the world of art – at least it didn’t move. Although we checked out the main Vancouver Art Gallery, it was in the small Bill Reid Gallery on Hornby Street that we came across something fascinating. No less than the discovery of a whole new civilisation.

Born in 1920, Bill Reid was the son of a Scottish father and First Nation mother who was working quite happily as a radio announcer in Toronto when he happened to visit the local art gallery and spotted an old totem pole. Somehow it struck an atavistic nerve. On investigation, remarkably he found that the pole had originated in his mother’s village. Up till that time she had denied her heritage – that of the Haida people. Realising it was also his heritage, Bill started to trace his Haida roots.

The Haida Gwaii are a remote group of mountainous islands situated about 600 miles north of Vancouver off the coast of British Columbia and were formerly known as the Queen Charlotte Islands. It is possible that these islands provided a stepping stone during the first migration of humans from the Kamchatka Peninsula to the American mainland 13,000 years ago. For centuries the Haida were the dominant tribe of the area and as skilled and warlike canoe seafarers they gained a reputation as the ‘Vikings’ of the North-West. Their trading influence was felt throughout the west coast as far south as California. They were a matriarchal society in which the women made the major decisions – these included imposing the belief that all creatures were equal to humans. Less attractively, they built a society based on slavery. In 1800, their population was roughly 10,000.

Bill Reid Gallery, Vancouver

In the late 18th century, Europeans arrived for the first time and were initially thought to be visitors from the spirit world. They soon proved their human fallibility when they dropped off a crew member who was suffering from smallpox. The resulting epidemic hit the Haida so fast that there was not enough time to bury the dead. When typhoid and syphilis were added to the calamities infesting the islands, the Haida culture almost totally collapsed. At one point less than 300 people remained alive.

Gradually the usual West Canadian pattern of fur traders, then gold seekers, then logging companies seeking the ‘green gold’ arrived to exploit the islands, although even today the population is less than half that of 1800.

Finally in 1995, a measure of justice was achieved when the Canadian Government agreed with the Haida argument that the logging activities were destroying the balance of the earth and declared a dual co-operative area protected by watchmen. In 2010, the Queen Charlotte Islands were renamed Haida Gwaii (‘the islands of the people’).

Almost the only remaining evidence of the old civilisation remained in their totem poles. Usually made from cedar trees, they were erected when a chief died and the story passed on through the sculptures. In the ghost villages of the Haida, the poles were left to rot and to be re-absorbed by nature – a cemetery of mute history.

Bill Reid Gallery, Vancouver

Fascinated by what he found, Bill Reid studied the Haida tradition under tutelage of his maternal grandfather. He established his studio in Vancouver and worked on fusing modern techniques with the ancient principles of Haida art; the totem poles became his inspiration. Starting in the micro world of jewellery he realised that the same art could be magnified to vast sculptures. He himself became the living link between a lost world and a vibrant present. When he died in 1998, his friends paddled a canoe the six hundred miles up the Pacific coast to take his ashes to Haida Gwaii.

Bill Reid Gallery, Vancouver

It was in the prosaic surroundings of Vancouver Airport departure lounge that we came across probably Bill Reid’s finest work. Standing 12ft high, made of green bronze, and depicting a large canoe absolutely crammed to overflowing with a half human, half animal crew, it seems as if Bill had dismantled the figures on a totem pole and cast the assorted characters adrift in a boat. It is a Noah’s Ark of First Nation mythology. It is called ‘The Spirit of Haida Gwaii – the Jade Canoe’ and it is quite simply magnificent.

The Spirit of Haida Gwaii – Vancouver Airport

It was decided that we really should do something to engage with what was the essential Canadian sport – ice hockey. Oscar Wilde must have been driven by the same impulse but he chose to go to a lacrosse game instead. He appears to have enjoyed it saying that he preferred it to cricket. Afterwards he chatted to the Red Indian team, (they had invented the sport but had yet to invent the term ‘First Nation’). He rather upset even the minimal political correctness of the 1880s by suggesting that they played their games while wearing war bonnets and tomahawks. They declined the suggestion but presented him with a Red Indian feather fan all the same.

On the road to Langley, Vancouver

We set out about 6 30pm to reach the events arena in the suburb of Langley in good time. Boarding the Sky Station train at Granville St we travelled east for an hour, passing through sixteen stations till we emerged at Surrey Central. Sean checked his instructions.

“It’s only a bus ride away, so we should be OK.”

We found a bus with a ‘Langley’ destination and boarded it. On and on we went through night time suburb after night time suburb. At one point we noticed a sign that read ‘USA Border: 8m’.

Sean called out to the driver and asked if we were near Langley. All he received in reply was a taciturn “Nope”.

We travelled further and further east. Now we were late for the game.

“What time do they puck off?”

“I think the expression is puck drop, actually.”

Piles of snow started to re-appear. Finally even the road lights ceased.

“Where the hell are we going?”

After one and a half hours travel the bus pulled into a stop and through the darkness we spotted the Events Arena ahead.

Sean with a hockey fan, Vancouver

After buying burgers and shakes at the rear of the rink, we climbed down to our seats to watch the action. The local team, the Vancouver Giants, were already losing to the Prince George team and tempers were fraying.

It seemed that there were really four elements to an ice hockey match. The first was the very fast and undoubtedly skilful skating work and the genuine courage of the goalkeeper in facing a fusillade of puck attacks.

But after about ten minutes the play stopped and the large teams, most of whom seem to have been confined to the rink-side benches, went off for a conference. The advertising section then took over. In this case a supermarket team occupied the rink with volunteers attempting to throw oversize groceries into an outsize trolley. It was quite weird. A giant bottle of wine made of inflatable vinyl floated over the heads of the spectators.

As the advertisers departed the third group arrived – the sweepers. These consisted of large smoothing machines levelling the ice, accompanied by teenagers with brooms. I think it was the comedian Linda Smith who described curling as ‘housework on ice’. I think the same applies to hockey as well.

Finally the teams returned and the fourth element of play came to the fore – the fights. Roughly every four minutes, play was suspended while both teams crashed together for a general exchange of blows. These altercations were then broken up by officials known as linesmen. What I only discovered later was that this was regarded as part of the actual match. Some of the team, called ‘enforcers’ or ‘goons’ are not there to skate and play but simply to beat up their opponents.

Although this behaviour was banned many years ago in Europe and in the Olympics, fighting is still part of the North American game. Most fights consist of a player holding his opponent with one hand to maintain balance while punching him with the other. There is even an etiquette to the affrays. It is considered infra dig to use hockey sticks or ice skates to wound your antagonist, and penalty points can be added if you spit at the opposition or beat up the referee.

The Canadians are well aware of the general bloodiness of the sport. One variation of a perennial joke was: ‘I was drafted into World War Two. When I arrived on D Day it was hellish – a hockey game had broken out.’

In a 1987 game between Canada and the Soviet Union the altercation lasted so long and became so dangerous that the officials turned off the stadium lights in an effort to stop the brawl. It was to no avail and the game was declared null and void. As punishment the Soviet team was barred from the end-of-tournament dinner.

Another feature of the arena were the very high plexi-glass panels all around the rink itself. I had assumed that this was to protect the audience from a wayward puck. It appears that the extra height was actually introduced to protect the audience from the players. In 1979 a player from the Boston Bruins, enraged by comments from the crowd, had leapt over the barrier, torn off a spectator’s shoe and proceeded to beat him unconscious with it. Penalty points were awarded against him for this action.

We left at 9pm. It only took two and a half hours to get back to Granville Street.

I suppose that after experiencing a Canadian January it was appropriate that the last full day in the country should be spent in the snow. Leaving rain-swept Vancouver, Sean and I caught a bus that took us eighty miles north along the Horseshoe Bay sea fjord, up the Squamish River valley, and then above and beyond the snow line to the ski resort of Whistler.

Ski Lift at Whistler

The sky had cleared when we arrived and now the sun sparkled on the pine-clad slopes and white-tipped summits of the mountains surrounding the town. Whistler turned out to be a Swiss village that had been plucked out of the Alps and dropped into the Rockies. It had a cheerfully holiday atmosphere rather like an upmarket fairground. Its pedestrian-precinct streets meandered between the gaudy restaurants, bars, and hotels that catered to the two million visitors that Whistler receives each year.

Whistler – the Dubh Linn Inn

The town had been sub-divided into three village districts. Upper and Whistler were separated by woods and a small creek while North was situated further down the hill. The resort had been the host of the Winter Olympics in 2010, an event commemorated by a sculpture of the five connecting Olympic Rings in the North Village Plaza.

Olympic Rings, Whistler

Having checked out the attractions, we wandered up past the Irish pub (I think that it is now compulsory for every town world-wide to have an Irish pub) and watched the action on the slopes. Dangling gondolas conveyed the cargo of skiers on an endless loop to the upper slopes of Blackcomb Mountain to the left and Whistler Mountain to the right.

Blackcomb Mountain, Whistler

For a moment we wondered whether we should hire some equipment and join the throng, then decided that maybe après ski activities were preferable. In my case this consisted of finding a comfortable armchair in a five star hotel lobby, while Sean went for a walk in the adjacent forest.

Mountain stream, Whistler

And that, as far as our venture into Canada went, seemed like it was going to be that. I hadn’t realised that the country still had a wonderful gift left to push our way.

As we strolled back in the early evening we turned to look up the slopes. The very tip of Blackcombe Mountain was tinged with pink from the setting sun; the mackerel sky above it turned to mauve. The swaying figure of the last skier floated left and right down the mountainside before curving to a neat halt by the now deserted ski lifts. Emptied of its human ants, the black bulk of the mountain began to merge into the twilight.

The last descent, Evening in Whistler

Below us in the town the outline of each tree and each building was decorated by coloured electric bulbs. A faint catch of music – Neil Diamond’s ‘Sweet Caroline’ – drifted up the hill. Whistler glowed with welcome as the dusk grew deeper and the air chiller.

We walked down towards it and, using a covered bridge to cross the creek, entered a path that wound its way between the tall pines. In this patch of forest suddenly we were alone – just the trees and the snow and nightfall.

Evening sky at Whistler

We paused in silence and realisation seeped in. We were literally ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ and they were indeed lovely, dark and deep. We were slap bang in the heart of one of the greatest poems ever written.

It didn’t really matter that it was by the American Robert Frost and it was about a night in Vermont. It was obviously close to the Canadian soul – Justin Trudeau even quoted the lines at his father’s funeral.

It was one of those moments when time stops and you really have nowhere else in the world where you would prefer to be.

And then you realise that there are still miles to go – about five thousand of them – back to England.

Whistler

Next Tuesday on January 8 – a very different story – the long trip round Ireland for a bet. 20 shows in 20 towns in 40 days – hitch-hiking, camping, and performing every second day.

Although very little remains of Vancouver’s past, some effort at conservation has been made in the oldest original settlement known as ‘Gas Town’. The pride of place here has been given to the much photographed ‘Steam Clock’ – a twelve feet high clock powered by a steam engine which announces the quarter hours with a whistle chime and the top of the hour with a puff of steam. It looked Victorian but turned out to have been installed in the 1970s. The authentic spirit of Gas Town turned out to be not architectural but human.

The Steam Clock, Vancouver

John ‘Gassy Jack’ Deighton was born in 1830 in Hull, England and is the man most credited with establishing the city of Vancouver. A contemporary described him as being of ‘grotesque, Falstaffian proportions’ but his nickname stemmed from volubility rather than gastric disorders. He was never happier than when he was regaling strangers with tales of his adventures. To be fair, he certainly had a tale to tell.

He joined the British fleet at the age of 14, then deserted to the American fleet because the food was better. Later he became a bucko mate on a clipper bound for San Francisco, enforcing ship’s discipline at the end of his fist and the tip of his boot. Having failed to find gold in California he headed north to pan the Frazer River diggings. When this also failed he trained as a river pilot and ended up as the best on the Frazer. His next venture as a saloon keeper was ruined when his manager embezzled the takings, forcing Gassy Jack to move on.

The mountains from central Vancouver

In true pioneer style, he acquired a dugout canoe, filled it with his First Nation wife, his mother-in-law, his dog, two chickens, his wife’s cousin Big William to do the paddling, and a whisky barrel. In Sept 1867 he landed in Burrard Inlet where amidst the swampy wilderness he found some logging activity already in place. Spotting an opportunity he set up an embryo tavern by placing a plank across two tree stumps.

Then he struck a momentous deal with the loggers. If they would build him a large hut he would supply them with all the whisky they could drink in a single session. Within 24 hours his shed was erected and the loggers suitably refreshed. He named the new saloon ‘the Globe’ and the patch of land around it ‘Maple Tree Square’ after the tree under whose branches he and his family sheltered.

The Flatiron Building, Vancouver

Despite this success the infant Vancouver was not a particularly salubrious spot. Jack wrote in a letter: ‘This was a lonesome place when I came here first, surrounded by Indians. I cared not to look outdoors after dark. There was a friend of mine about a mile distant found with his head cut in two. The Indian was caught and hanged.’

Although officially the new settlement was named Granville after a British political grandee, unofficially it was called ‘Gastown’ after its garrulous saloon keeper. As the place began to flourish Jack was able to construct a rather grand building named the Deighton Hotel. He maintained order in his usual manner by liberal use of his fist. When his wife died, he married her 12 year old niece Madelaine.

Vancouver pioneers statue

However Jack’s reign did not last long. In 1875, after an evening in which his dog presaged the future with desolate howls, Jack died aged 44. The Deighton Hotel was burnt down during the Great Fire of Vancouver in 1886. His wife Madelaine however survived till 1948. She said that Jack had told her that the inlet: “would make the nicest of harbours. I might not live to see it, but it will be a port someday.”

Jack Deighton has not been forgotten in the place he created. The district was renamed ‘Gas Town’ and in 1970 his statue was erected in Maple Tree Square. It is his main memorial. That, and the City of Vancouver.

Gassy Jack statue with Sean, Vancouver

It turned out that Granville Street, where our hotel was situated, had something of a reputation. Sean mentioned after a trip outside that it had seemed a bit edgy. It was an obvious entertainment area filled with cafes and bars and even a sex shop with a large sign in the window that proudly announced:

Thoughtfully the local Starbucks had provided a bin in their lavatories for the disposal of one’s used hypodermic needles.

Adult store, Vancouver

But what was really striking was the amount of sheer literal madness on the street. All major cities now have their homeless, their beggars, and their insane, but Granville Street seemed to be overrun by them. At times it resembled an open air Bedlam.

Over the length of a day we witnessed a man running along the road and screaming as he dodged the honking traffic. Another man squatted on the pavement while bending double and emitting high-pitched shrieks. Another walked past our bus queue with his arms outstretched conducting an invisible choir.

Later we watched a ‘carer’ who looked like an extra from ‘Mad Max’ hurtling down an incline pushing a wheel chair. Its cackling invalid occupant lolled alarmingly over the side wheel.

Occasionally we noticed a man talking to a wall on an imaginary mobile phone – it seemed that he talked either to God or Satan depending on the time of day.

Granville Street, Vancouver

In a city touted as one of the most desirable places to live on the planet and amidst huge wealth, Granville St and Eastside Downtown at times seemed like a vision of urban hell.

Amazingly, it turned out that this situation had arisen as a result of deliberate government policy. Prior to the 1980s Vancouver had not had a homeless problem as sufficient affordable housing was provided by the authorities. This programme then had been stopped. Houses continued to be built but only in the private sector. The poor were priced out of the market and now had no public sector housing on which to rely.

Homelessness in itself causes a disproportionate amount of addiction and emotional instability – ‘no direction home’ – and extra cuts to social care pushed a new wave of the mentally ill out onto the streets. Other cuts to welfare funding meant that access to food had become more limited, and the street people were increasingly reliant on begging and sifting through garbage. By the year 2000, the amount of homeless vagrants in Vancouver had increased to 600. By the time of our arrival in 2017 it was now over 4000.

In the end one had to wonder what was the more insane – the street zombies or the political ideology that had so intensified their misery.

Side street, Vancouver

Amidst this social wreckage Granville Street did provide a glimpse of glamour in the shape of a Hollywood-style ‘Walk of Fame’ – a line of bronze stars inlaid in the pavement bearing the names of the famous. However, as the names consisted entirely of British Columbian celebrities, to us it was more like a ‘Walk of Obscurity’. The only name that we had heard of was that of Chief Dan George.

I remembered him in the Clint Eastwood film ‘The Outlaw Josie Wales’ and in ‘Little Big Man’ starring Dustin Hoffman in 1970. George had been nominated for an Academy Award for his role in the latter film, the first member of the First Nation to receive that honour. After a life as a longshoreman and school bus driver, he had not taken up acting until the age of 62 and then only by chance.

Granville St Walk of Fame, Vancouver

His eldest son Robert had been playing the role of a ‘Red Indian’ in a Canadian TV series. When a white actor who had been playing the role of an old ‘Indian’ fell ill, the director asked where he could find a replacement. Robert had remarked: “Why don’t you try a real old Indian. I’ve got one at home.” A star was born.

Chief Dan George

As the rain continued to lash Vancouver (a not uncommon event), Sean and I looked around for some indoor entertainment. On an extended pier beside the ferry harbour, we noticed a queue outside an attraction called ‘Flight of the Dragon and Fly Over Canada’. This sounded interesting – we both fancied seeing a film about the natural beauty of the country through which we had so recently passed. It would make a pleasantly restful interlude before the evening.

We joined the queue and quickly glanced over the introductory brochure:

“Buckle up your seat-belt and get prepared for our virtual flight ride double feature! First, follow a mythical dragon as you soar over some of China’s most spectacular landscapes during Flight of the Dragon.

Then take off once again to experience the Ultimate Flying Ride, a thrilling virtual flight that takes you across Canada from east-to-west.

The experience is a gentle ride. Guests sit in chairlift-style seats and are elevated before a large, spherical screen. Both rides incorporate state of the art special effects including wind, scents, and mist in addition to the movement of your seat to make you feel like you are truly flying.

The experience is suitable for young children (must be 40″ tall) and seniors alike.”

This sounded reasonable enough and, as I had never experienced virtual reality before, could be an interesting half hour. Underneath the main advert there was a smaller print addition:

“A tiny percentage of the public may find it uncomfortable. Therefore, if you are particularly susceptible to motion sickness or fear of heights, you may wish to consider refraining from participating.”

This did give me pause for thought. Despite the fact that both Sean and I are very experienced air passengers and Sean in particular has flown hundreds of thousands of miles, we both suffer from acrophobia. I get dizzy standing on a chair, and Sean is not much better. On the other hand, there were dozens of young children in the queue ahead, some aged about six. And this was not reality, it was virtual – there was absolutely nothing that could go wrong. With an indulgent shrug we paid $20 each and joined the queue.

NJT and bear

After passing through a waiting room, we were led to a corridor to stand in lines before filing through to a ‘cyclorama room’ – a blank screen ahead of us protected by a safety bar. A row of seats resembling dentists’ chairs faced the screen. We were told to stack our possessions under the seats and then strap ourselves in with safety belts. For the first time, I had a sense of foreboding. A jovially menacing guard strode along the passage in front of us announcing that if anyone wished to leave, now was the time to do it. I gave a slightly worried glance to Sean. He reassured me:

“It’ll be OK. If you feel dizzy, the trick is to keep looking at the side wall. That’ll give you a sense of perspective.”

I settled back.

Then all hell let loose. The side wall that I’d just been told to watch vanished. The safety rail ahead suddenly snapped down and out of sight. The floor beneath disappeared and we were left dangling thirty feet in the air. Then the screen ahead burst into life and we were flung into virtual space and hurtling down a waterfall at fifty miles an hour with a writhing dragon for company.

After about four seconds I realised that I was in for one of the nastiest experiences of my life – my acrophobia exploded into near swoon. I realised that the only way to survive was to close my eyes. For the next five minutes I clutched on to the chair for dear life, while occasionally being hit in the face by a spray of water presumably representing rain clouds or dragons’ piss or something. It’s difficult to be precise about details when one’s eyes are clenched shut. A couple of times I ventured to peep out only to swoop into a passing mountain or dive bomb a skyscraper. An utterly terrifying five minutes.

Finally and mercifully they stopped the machine. This had just been the warm up – the main feature was still to come. As the room returned to normal for a minute, I looked at Sean. Sean looked at me. We both looked at the attendant and, unhooking the safety straps, demanded to be released. With a sniff of contempt, he nodded his permission. We walked out in a halo of shame as the row of six-year-olds gazed at us in disdainful puzzlement.

Sean in Vancouver

Stumbling off to the nearest Starbucks, we slowly recovered. But what a total disgrace. And our own fault as well. What in God’s name had ever possessed two grown adults who were perfectly aware of their height aversion to go on a ride that had been labelled as unsuitable for people with a fear of heights? Unbelievable! Even the film had been absurd – rain clouds and dragons. It was like a bad acid trip in Wales.

I looked again at the brochure and noted that the ride had been advertised as ‘gently thrilling’.

Vancouver Art Gallery

Next week on New Years Day Jan 1st – the last episode in Canada – a town called Whistler.

The next morning, the train pulled into the Albertan capital of Edmonton at 9am. Climbing down from the carriage to take a stroll in the air, I noticed Shawna Caspi walking along the platform towards the city. She was a rather courageous sight – her slim form clutching her possessions and trudging off through the snow to face Alberta. To misquote Paul Simon’s song ‘Homeward Bound’: ‘A rucksack and guitar in hand – a poet and a one-girl band’. The spirit of the Sixties is not dead as long as such pilgrims as Shawna are around.

Edmonton, Alberta

Edmonton was the furthest north that we reached on the journey. Predictably it was known as the ‘Gateway to the North’ and was home to 1.4 million people. One of the reasons for the surprising size of the population was the huge expansion in the exploitation of the oil sands of northern Alberta. This was the subject of much controversy both in Canada and internationally. In liberal centres like Toronto and Vancouver, Alberta was seen as the heartland of the ‘Three R’s’ – ‘Rightwing, Redneck, and Reactionary’ – Texas with added permafrost. As my total experience of the place consisted of leaning over a fence looking at snow for half an hour, I decided to refrain from comment.

We left at 9 30am and the train ambled on through the sprawling industrial landscape before halting entirely. This was due to yet another of Bill bloody Gates’s bloody freight trains.

Manitoba

One way to take exercise on the railway was to walk the length of the rolling stock – a good half a mile of careening off corridor walls and lurching over couplings. It was on one such expedition that I came across an attractive young woman clasping a handkerchief to her nose – her mouth, chin, and hands were covered in dried blood. She gazed at me silently. I shook my head in sympathy:

“Oh dear, nose bleed, eh? Never mind, just try and hold your head back. That should do it.” With that breezy advice I strolled on along the train.

Going west, we passed Lake Wabamum – the tracks of the snow mobiles used for ice fishing had scoured arabesques on its glassy surface. Thinking back to Joni Mitchell, I remembered the track ‘River’ on her brilliant album ‘Blue’. There was a line in it – ‘I wish I had a river I could skate away on’ – that I had always thought was some throwaway hippie dope fantasy. Now it dawned where the line had originated – she had literally meant ‘a river that she could skate on’. She had grown up with them.

Sean pointed out another nearby stretch of water called ‘Disaster Lake’. He had assumed that the ‘disaster’ must have been a massacre of pioneers or a horrific wagon crash. In fact it had been so named because an early explorer had accidentally smashed his whisky bottle there. They seemed to have had their priorities right in those days.

Nearing the Rockies – Alberta

Having spent almost thirty hours travelling across the dead level plains of the Prairie States, we now finally started to see small hillocks and gentle valleys. The hills grew higher and the valleys deeper – and we began to winding our way into the glorious Rockies. The observation car crammed up with passengers gazing upwards in silence. ‘Awesome’ is an overused word but here in these soaring mountains it was the correct one. Back in Wilde’s day, the then Governor-General of Canada, the Marquis of Lorne, had travelled here. He commented that the Rockies were ‘a mixture of Scotland and Heaven’.

We arrived in Jaspar at 3pm – the temperature was minus ten. Jaspar was a passably pleasant-looking village but seemed inhibited by the vastness looming all around it. While it might be a rip-roaring carousal in the right season, during our visit a desultory silence hung over the place like a sea mist. The atmosphere felt like someone waiting for a bus. We took photographs of the town totem pole and returned to the train.

Totem pole in Jaspar, B.C.

The construction of the railroad through Alberta and the Rockies had been extraordinarily difficult but the builders had at least one advantage. They had not come under attack from the hostile First Nation peoples. The reason for this lay in an interesting character called Chief Crowfoot, head of the Blackfoot tribe. Crowfoot was a renowned warrior, the survivor of nineteen battles, who at one point considered an alliance with his American colleague Sitting Bull of the Lakota Sioux to oppose the white man’s onslaught. The arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railroad presented Crowfoot with a dilemma – to fight or allow passage. In an unheroic but profoundly sensible move, he decided to allow access. He demanded and received one important concession though – that he should be awarded a lifelong free rail pass.

As twilight fell, the train twisted and turned its way like a cautious boa constrictor past the snow encrusted pine trees, alongside the frozen lakes, and round the enormous peaks of amazing British Columbia.

Train in British Columbia

After a couple of after-dinner drinks I went to bed early leaving Sean chatting with a few people in the mid train cafeteria. Around midnight, I half awoke to hear the voice of a stewardess addressing a passenger in the corridor outside:

“We have a situation here. Do not go forward of this carriage”. She sounded worried and there was a distinct tenseness in the air. However, it seemed to die down and I slumped back into sleep.

Next morning I joined Sean for breakfast in the dining car.

“Did you have a quiet night, Dad?” he inquired.

“Not bad at all. How about you?”

“Well……”

It transpired that after my departure from the cafeteria, an Australian passenger who had been hitting the booze practically all day, turned very nasty indeed. He began insulting various passengers including Sean and when it seemed that they might challenge him in return, he produced a knife and started flashing it in defiance. A train steward had arrived to cool things down but the standoff remained tense.

At roughly the same time a couple of carriages further along, the young lady who I had noticed earlier suffering from a nose bleed, rushed from her cabin with an even more profuse nose bleed and screaming that her dread-locked black boyfriend was trying to kill her. A train guard rushed to her aid.

Meanwhile back at the knife fight, the steward had managed to calm the Australian long enough for the evacuation of the cafeteria. The train controller phoned ahead for police back up and between them arranged a rendezvous at the next station. This turned out to be the town of Kamloops. With relief the train stewards turned the black boyfriend over for arrest and as the Australian was due to depart here in any case allowed him to leave unopposed.

“Apart from that, I had a quiet night as well” said Sean as he ate his cornflakes.

All that I could add was that, according to the guidebook, it was in Kamloops in 1911 that the famous horror film star Boris Karloff joined his first theatre company. Not a lot of people know that.

The train in the Rockies

We spent the morning following the lovely valley of the Frazer River as we descended the western side of the Rockies and for the first time in four days left the snow behind. We were in beaver territory.

The Frazer River

Then the valley widened into a plain of neat farms and ploughed fields; we started to see quite large boats working their way up and down the waterway; and at 1pm (eighty-five hours after leaving Toronto) the train arrived at its final destination – Pacific Central Station, Vancouver.

Vancouver Station

VANCOUVER

Having checked into the Ramada Hotel on Granville Street, Sean and I strolled out in search of food. We stopped off at a café opposite the Vogue Theatre that was advertising the forthcoming visit of the 1980s British singer Adam Ant (proof of the adage that old pop stars never die – they just go west).

It was in this café that I had my first taste of the one great dish that the country has given to the world – poitine. It consisted of thick potato chips covered in cheese curds and gravy and was splendid. Subtle, no; delicious, yes. Pronounced ‘poo-tin’, some claim that the name derives from the English word ‘pudding’, but the Quebec authorities insist on its French roots and that it translates as ‘a mess’. This conviction may stem from the Gallic disdain for the crudity of its ingredients and presentation.

The following day, we set out to explore the city. It was now raining hard and I was reminded of a quote from my all-time favourite American comedy show ‘Frazier’. When commenting on the weather in Seattle (only 100 miles south), Frazier declared scathingly that “the state flower is mildew!”

Partly for shelter and partly for instruction, we took the trolley bus tour of the city. As we set off, the driver’s commentary started with the observation that: “On your left you will see a hospital. If you get sick, that’s where you go.” As we drove on the quality of his information fortunately became less basic.

The population of Vancouver is now two and a half million of which over half the residents have a first language other than English. Although now it has spread out into miles of far-flung suburbs, the heart of the city was built on the Burrard Peninsula that projects westwards between the Frazer River to the south and the Burrard Inlet to the north. Beyond the Inlet the North Shore Mountains dominate the skyline, while to the west lie the Pacific Ocean and Vancouver Island.

North Vancouver

Sir Francis Drake may have visited the area in 1579, but the Spanish definitely came here in 1791. The following year, Captain George Vancouver of the British Royal Navy arrived and distributed English names to its geographical features. Not much happened after that until 1862 when some logging activity began.

The city received its real boost in 1886 when our old friend William Van Horne literally steamed into town on the first trans-continental train and made the place the western rail-head of the Canadian Pacific. In a formal ceremony, he pronounced the settlement to be a city and that it was to be named in honour of George Vancouver.

Two months later, the city celebrated its new status in the usual Canadian fashion by being totally destroyed by fire. It was quickly rebuilt and never looked back.

NJT and Sean – Lonsdale Market, North Vancouver

Next Tuesday on December 25 – Christmas Day! And More Canadian stories – meet Gassy Jack and Have a Gently Thrilling Ride.